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!

  • ShouldIHaveFun@feddit.ch
    1·
    10 months ago

    Don’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.

  • Kabutor@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    1·
    10 months ago

    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

  • kugmo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    When asking help with your laptop, not providing your laptop’s model number is a great way to not get proper help.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      01·
      10 months ago

      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

  • Nate@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      02·
      10 months ago

      Not that one. Not from a company too. Maybe only using legacy only will solve this.

          • Nate@programming.devEnglish
            0·
            10 months ago

            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.

            • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
              01·
              10 months ago

              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

  • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Pantherina@feddit.deOP
      0·
      10 months ago

      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…