swapping disk with UEFI hardware - a dead end?

[Chris Murphy]

On Jun 28, 2012, at 7:29 AM, Peter Jones wrote:
> Having sent that mail it became obvious that what's happened is that your
> new x220 board doesn't have the efi boot variable set.  Some machines allow
> you to boot from a file, in which case it'll be /efi/fedora/grubx64.efi .
> If your firmware doesn't have that, you'll need to boot some install/rescue
> media to get to a shell.

It is perturbing that in 2012, with a nearly 30MB operating system as a pre-boot environment, that by design it doesn't scan the EFI System partition for other possible boot options - like a rescue mode - in the event efi boot variables aren't set.

Apple hardware does just such a scan. If I blow away every bit of information in NVRAM, the firmware still scans available disks, and chooses a reasonable default as fallback. Even in the case when Apple's bootloader isn't present.

So after all of this UEFI complexity and baggage, we still need rescue media in the example case? That is unbelievably stupid. The Lenovo case is either a bug or it's bad design or they enjoy creating user hostile hardware.

Chris Murphy