Arch Linux

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,020

UEFI Installation Only Boots with F12 Boot Menu

I just installed Windows and Arch Linux on a UEFI system. The Windows EFI partition is partition 3 and the Linux EFI partition (Grub, set up to launch either Linux or Windows) is partition 4.

If I push F12 for the one-time boot menu at startup, and then select (UEFI boot) either partition 3 (for Windows, directly) or partition 4 (for Grub to go to either Windows or Linux), it works perfectly.

https://i.imgur.com/fz6HXH6.jpeg

However, if I set the UEFI BIOS to boot partition 3 or 4 in UEFI mode, on its own, so I don't have to push F12 at startup, like this...

https://i.imgur.com/89PdHsw.jpeg

Windows gives me a blue screen of death and (after Grub seemingly loads with no problem) Arch Linux gives me this:

https://i.imgur.com/fawQJrh.jpeg

Last edited by tony5429 (2025-01-31 08:38:18)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,923

Re: UEFI Installation Only Boots with F12 Boot Menu

Sounds like a bug in your UEFI and the hard disk not yet being fully visible to other systems when doing the auto boot. Do you have a fast boot option in there? Try to disable that, otherwise I'd check for UEFI firmware updates.

libretechsupport

Member

Registered: 2025-01-13

Posts: 4

Re: UEFI Installation Only Boots with F12 Boot Menu

You could boot into arch (or any distro) and check the EFI variables with efibootmgr. You may have an invalid boot entry set as the default.

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,020

Re: UEFI Installation Only Boots with F12 Boot Menu

Sounds like a bug in your UEFI and the hard disk not yet being fully visible to other systems when doing the auto boot. Do you have a fast boot option in there? Try to disable that, otherwise I'd check for UEFI firmware updates.

Thank you. I did have a fast boot option which I disabled but that didn't solve the problem. I also updated the UEFI BIOS to a newer version (had some trouble upgrading to the newest version, which I'm still trying to troubleshoot) but that didn't solve the problem either. One more note that I had intended to make in the original post: I have 2 identical Dell 7370 laptops and did the entire process (Windows install followed by Arch Linux dual boot install) on the other machine with a smaller non-NVME M.2 SSD. That worked perfectly and booted up just fine without requiring me to use the F12 key each time. I discovered the issue after the Windows install on the second machine, and then found that it persisted after the Arch Linux install. This second machine has a larger (4 TB) NVME M.2 SSD. What's more, I moved the 4-TB NVME M.2 SSD to the original machine and the issue was present on the first machine too. So, I'm thinking there's some connection to either NVME technology, or that specific SSD. I do have a 3rd spare smaller but NVME SSD which I may test to see if I can narrow down the issue to either NVME or the specific large NVME SSD.

Last edited by tony5429 (2025-02-04 23:47:48)

tony5429

Member

Registered: 2006-03-28

Posts: 1,020

Re: UEFI Installation Only Boots with F12 Boot Menu

You could boot into arch (or any distro) and check the EFI variables with efibootmgr. You may have an invalid boot entry set as the default.

Thanks for the tip. I may try this, but am not super-hopeful since the issue also applies to the Windows installation.

crongoblin

Member

Registered: 2021-03-17

Posts: 1

Re: UEFI Installation Only Boots with F12 Boot Menu

Is this all on one physical disk? If so, I believe you'll be wanting to get rid of one of those ESPs (EFI System Partitions - what you're referring to as Windows UEFI and Linux UEFI partitions - same as ESP). If you have two ESPs, especially on one disk, it is not recommended.

Have you read through:
Dual Boot With Windows? Section 1.2 might be helpful, but reading and (almost) understanding it in it's entirety it is where I found my answer.

This might help as well:
Arch boot process#UEFI_2. There is a table on this page that gives you different 'bootloaders' you can use once you have narrowed down to one ESP.

I hope any of this helps.

I do have a question about having one ESP on each of two physical disks, one Windows and one Linux and you WANT the behavior you described (having to Function key into boot device selection), will any one of those OSs load correctly as the default boot device without entering boot device selection? The way BIOS/MBR used to work?