HP laptop crashes (not booting any more) after fixing uefi variables

HP laptop crashes (not booting any more) after fixing uefi variables

[George Buranov]

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Hello everybody.



I have a question, that does not deal directly with grub2, however I found
this issue when investigating grub2 for UEFI. I noticed that when I
change/add new UEFI boot variables (both Boot#### and BootOrder), after the
change the system becomes unbootable.



Unbootable means really "brick" - even BIOS screen is not loaded. This
occurred twice on HP laptop only. I was able to fix the issue only by
hardware NVRAM rewriting in service.



I can't reproduce the issue on other UEFI computers....



Don't you notice the same stuff when investigation UEFI booting?



Regards,

Georgy

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Re: HP laptop crashes (not booting any more) after fixing uefi variables

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

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On 16.03.2011 08:48, George Buranov wrote:
>
> Hello everybody.
>
>  
>
> I have a question, that does not deal directly with grub2, however I
> found this issue when investigating grub2 for UEFI. I noticed that
> when I change/add new UEFI boot variables (both Boot#### and
> BootOrder), after the change the system becomes unbootable.
>
>  
>
> Unbootable means really "brick" - even BIOS screen is not loaded. This
> occurred twice on HP laptop only. I was able to fix the issue only by
> hardware NVRAM rewriting in service.
>
>  
>
> I can't reproduce the issue on other UEFI computers....
>
>  
>
> Don't you notice the same stuff when investigation UEFI booting?
>
Did you mean "Did we notice that EFI is crap?" The answer is "yes, all
the time". This problem however isn't about EFI but about initialisation
routines misinterpreting NVRAM or NVRAM writing routines being broken.
Since we don't have the relevant source code we can't help you. Your
only option is to contact HP and ask them to fix this bug in new
firmware upgrade (but first check that no upgrade is available for your
laptop).
If firmware upgrade isn't an option I recommend blacklisting efivars and
installing bootloaders in "removable" mode. If you give exact reference
to this laptop (e.g. dmidecode output) we can blacklist it from
grub-install normal installation.
>
>  
>
> Regards,
>
> Georgy
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Grub-devel mailing list
> Grub-devel@gnu.org
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
>   


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko



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