Boot Issue on ThinkPad T420

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I’ve recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkPad T420 laptop with a Crucial 256GB SSD and 8GB of RAM, nothing crazy but pretty solid.

I’ve wanted to give Tumbleweed a run so I created my boot media, load up the installer on the ThinkPad and setup an encrypted LVM using the default BTRFS and ZFS filesystems. Everything goes well, the installer completes and I am in KDE at the first run. However, after I power off/on the ThinkPad no longer sees any OS, if I put in the bootable thumb drive and select “Boot from Disk” instead of install I get an “Unable to find EFI, no disk.”

I’ve checked my bios settings to make sure both legacy and UEFI are enabled.

I was curious if there were support issues regarding ZFS/BTRFS on certain hardware, however I re-installed using only ext4 and am running into the same issues. I know it’s not the laptop as I can swap my Debian 8 drive back in which boots fine. I’m not sure what I’m missing, this is my first time using OpenSUSE, I’m more familiar on the Debian side of things.

2

I’m not sure what went wrong.

One possibility, is that you installed for UEFI booting, but the only EFI partition is on the install media.

Can you boot the installer in rescue mode, and post the output of

# efibootmgr -v
3

You must boot the install media in EFI mode. Stick to EFI and never ever mix EFI and legacy

You should have in addition to your encrypted LVM a 500 meg /boot and a 100 meg or so FAT formatted EFI boot mounted as /boot/efi. In addition you should be using grub2-efi not just grub2

Tick secure boot if you plan to use it. Probably best to install with secure boot off in the BIOS

4

Below is the output of the efibootmgr

Absolute path to ‘efibootmgr’ is ‘/usr/sbin/efibootmgr’, so running it may require superuser privileges (eg. root).

drew@linux-pk2p:~> sudo efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0019
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0019,001A,0006,0007,0008,0009,000A,000B,000C,000D,000E,000F,0010,0011,0012,0013
Boot0000  Setup FvFile(721c8b66-426c-4e86-8e99-3457c46ab0b9)
Boot0001  Boot Menu     FvFile(126a762d-5758-4fca-8531-201a7f57f850)
Boot0002  Diagnostic Splash Screen      FvFile(a7d8d9a6-6ab0-4aeb-ad9d-163e59a7a380)
Boot0003  Startup Interrupt Menu        FvFile(f46ee6f4-4785-43a3-923d-7f786c3c8479)
Boot0004  ME Configuration Menu FvFile(82988420-7467-4490-9059-feb448dd1963)
Boot0005  Rescue and Recovery   FvFile(665d3f60-ad3e-4cad-8e26-db46eee9f1b5)
Boot0006* USB CD        VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,86701296aa5a7848b66cd49dd3ba6a55)
Boot0007* USB FDD       VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,6ff015a28830b543a8b8641009461e49)
Boot0008* ATAPI CD0     VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,aea2090adfde214e8b3a5e471856a35401)
Boot0009* ATA HDD2      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f602)
Boot000A* ATA HDD0      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f600)
Boot000B* ATA HDD1      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f601)
Boot000C* USB HDD       VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,33e821aaaf33bc4789bd419f88c50803)
Boot000D* PCI LAN       VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,78a84aaf2b2afc4ea79cf5cc8f3d3803)
Boot000E* ATAPI CD1     VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,aea2090adfde214e8b3a5e471856a35403)
Boot000F* ATAPI CD2     VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,aea2090adfde214e8b3a5e471856a35404)
Boot0010  Other CD      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,aea2090adfde214e8b3a5e471856a35406)
Boot0011* ATA HDD3      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f603)
Boot0012* ATA HDD4      VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f604)
Boot0013* Other HDD     VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f606)
Boot0014* IDER BOOT CDROM       PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x16,0x2)/Ata(0,1,0)
Boot0015* IDER BOOT Floppy      PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x16,0x2)/Ata(0,0,0)
Boot0016* ATA HDD       VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,91af625956449f41a7b91f4f892ab0f6)
Boot0017* ATAPI CD:     VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,aea2090adfde214e8b3a5e471856a354)
Boot0018* PCI LAN       VenMsg(bc7838d2-0f82-4d60-8316-c068ee79d25b,78a84aaf2b2afc4ea79cf5cc8f3d3803)
Boot0019* opensuse-secureboot   HD(1,GPT,9872ee92-6fb7-457f-bf09-12a4be02609d,0x800,0x4e000)/File(\EFI\opensuse\shim.efi)
Boot001A* debian        HD(1,GPT,ac8216b2-ac6a-4dac-887e-3e4ea3acf394,0x800,0x100000)/File(\EFI\debian\grubx64.efi)
5

Well I’ll be ****ed… I set it to EFI only in the BIOS and did a re-install, ran the command to get the output above (just in case) and did a reboot… worked like a charm…

Thanks for the help! I’m stoked to step out of the Debian world for a bit and get my feet wet in OpenSUSE!

6

Check and be sure you have a fat formatted EFI boot partition

7

Your list of EFI boot options is longer than mine.

On my Lenovo ThinkServer, there’s an option to “prefer UEFI” booting, and there’s an option for EFI only. With either of those, I get the BIOS options for setting the default boot order among the various EFI possibilities. But if I set it to prefer legacy booting, then I don’t see all of those BIOS settings. I’ve occasionally changed to prefer MBR booting (to install something). Then I have to switch back to “pref EFI” and reboot, in order to get the EFI related settings.