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Re: [LUG] Getting to UEFI

 

On 01/04/17 17:16, Neil via list wrote:

> not very helpful ..  ls: cannot access '/sys/firmware/efi': No such file
> or directory
> 
> And the next one, very terse
> 
> Z170 Extreme4
> 

Ah ha, no, that's much better. You have one of these:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/z170%20extreme4/

You're also definitely booting in BIOS mode after all, not UEFI
(otherwise you'd have the /sys/firmware/efi directory present on your
system). The 'hit' earlier from dmesg was just your machine probing the
ACPI tables for UEFI entry points, and we can now ignore that.

So far so good!

First make sure your keyboard is getting picked up at all during system
initialization: reboot, wait for the black screens before the OS
properly starts up and bang ctrl+alt+del a few times. Hopefully the
system will immediately reboot again. This tells us that your keyboard
is at least working during the BIOS stage.

Next, it's time to work through the usual BIOS hotkeys one after the
other (man, if I had $money for every time I've done this...) to see
which ones work.

According to your first email, it advises F2 for BIOS setup and F11 to
enter the alternative boot menu, which is pretty standard. So reboot and
providing you've first tested to make sure your keyboard is actually
functional during BIOS initialization, spam the F2 key. And I mean
really just turn the PC on and keep whacking F2 non-stop until either
you see the BIOS or it ignores you and boots into Xubuntu. Try it twice
just to make sure.

As for the F11 menu, *sometimes* they won't work until an alternative
boot method is actually physically available. If you stick a bootable
USB drive in the PC and reboot, see if F11 then starts working and
showing you the option to boot from it.

Depending on how your system is setup you may well find that once a
bootable USB is present, your PC prioritizes it above the internal disk
and boots from it by default. Either way, for peace of mind you still
want to get to the bottom of how to enter your BIOS reliably because at
some point in the future you're going to need to know this.

Report back!

Cheers
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