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Skunky

Member

Registered: 2018-01-25

Posts: 231

[Solved] UEFI boot entry disappear when hard drive gets unplugged

Hello everyone, if i unplug my hard drive and then boot my pc (without hard drive or with another one) then plug my hard drive back, my UEFI boot entry is not there anymore, i've been struggling with this issue for a long time now (here i was trying to recover my system ) and i would like to understand better how UEFI works, i don't think this is normal and it's also the reason because i'm still using Legacy mode.

I managed to get the hard drive recognized trough an external hdd case but when i boot i get dropped to a recovery shell  which says

Waiting 10 seconds for device  /dev/disk/by-uuid/xxxxxxxxxx
::mounting 'UUID=xxxxxxxxxx' on real root
mount: /new_root/: can't find UUID=xxxxxxxxxx
You are now being dropped into an emergency shell.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

I think GRUB generates UUID's but for someone reasons they get changed when i boot without the hard drive,  this make no sense to me, the only thing i can think off is that something get saved in the uefi/bios of my pc and when i boot with without that drive it gets cleared? No idea
Also it happened on my desktop pc too so i think this is not hardware related i didn't try other bootloader's.

Last edited by Skunky (2019-04-03 14:04:40)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,425

Re: [Solved] UEFI boot entry disappear when hard drive gets unplugged

i can think off is that something get saved in the uefi/bios of my pc and when i boot with without that drive it gets cleared?

That's what happens yes, and unless you get a smarter UEFI vendor, there's unlikely to be much you can do here, other than regenerate your UEFI entry from a chroot. If you have to move your harddisk around often, one thing you could try that should work is install a backup bootloader into the default location that is loaded if no known NVRAMs exist, which, if you are using GRUB, can be done with the --removable flag during GRUB UEFI installation

Last edited by V1del (2019-04-03 12:43:41)

Skunky

Member

Registered: 2018-01-25

Posts: 231

Re: [Solved] UEFI boot entry disappear when hard drive gets unplugged

Thank you for your quick reply, UEFI doesn't really bring me any advantage so i think i will stick with legacy for now, i just wanted to understand better UEFI behavior and i tought i was missing something but seems like my firmware is faulty so i think i will just give up on this pc thank you very much for your help