My stupid Lenovo “Thinkpad” UEFI doesnt have a real F12 devices menu.
It just shows registered UEFI targets that can be booted.
This is pretty catastrophic, somehow I got Fedora and Windows installed, but thats it. If something breaks, I am in trouble. I cant do a memtest86 even though I think my RAM is faulty.
So in Linux, is there a way to add an UEFI entry to boot just any USB stick? Or to boot a specific one, like with Ventoy on it?
Thanks!
You can look into using
efibootmgr
to create UEFI boot entriesDon’t you have an option to boot from usb in the BIOS?
Note that accessing the boot menus is not always with F12. Sometimes it’s also ESC, F1, F2 or DEL. You should try those.
or F11
If you have UEFI enabled, probably you also have secure boot. I did a script to create a usb pendrive that works with UEFI and Secure Boot, you can boot a liveusb Debian, Ubuntu or clonezilla at the moment
https://github.com/kabutor/liveusb
Edit: but I don’t think you can run memtestx86, last time I checked don’t have uefi support
When asking help with your laptop, not providing your laptop’s model number is a great way to not get proper help.
True. Its a Thinkpad T495
But what I meant is that I am pretty sure there is no secret setting, but that I simply need to fix it otherwise, like with rEFInd or something like that
Huh? Every ThinkPad I’ve had let’s me boot to a USB drive. Check your bios settings something is off, unless it’s through a company and they have it specifically disabled.
Not that one. Not from a company too. Maybe only using legacy only will solve this.
What model?
Thinkpad t495 amd
I’m not seeing anything that would be preventing this from showing up in the BIOS, is the USB drive formatted GPT? Does it recognize on any other computers? It may just be that it’s not discovering the EFI file. Also check Startup > Boot > Excluded from Boot Priority Order, but this shouldn’t matter for the F12 menu.
Some random thing fixed this. Maybe me nearly resetting my BIOS and then quitting? Or Windows attempting some “disk repair” again? Its showing devices now, since like half a year, its completely weird
rEFInd can auto-detect bootable devices, and you can select them during startup. You need to install it to the efi partition as your boot manager.
With a simple config edit and file copy operation, I put a memtest86 efi image on my boot partition, and it shows up as an option for every boot. It’s nice to know I won’t have to fumble around with USB drives if I need to test my RAM in the future.
Thats awesome! But sounds pretty hacky… so I would remove grub and use refind instead?
Fedora Kinoite is built for Grub afaik, with the deployments and all. Not wanting to destroy that really…
You can also chain rEFInd to GRUB if you don’t want to mess with that.