EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

Hunter1 · 2022-11-06 20:54:06

Hi,

Today I've connected my Huawei Matebook D14 to the Dell WD19TBS docking station that I till now was used only for work notebook. It worked without any issue until I rebooted. After the reboot GRUB input for password (I've encrypted my SSD with LUKS) didn't appear and laptop was stuck in boot loop (Huawei logo appeared and laptop restarted after few seconds).
I disconnected the docking station, restarted laptop and then I got message "No boot device".

To debug this issue I created Arch Live USB and checked the state of the SSD partitioning. Based on fdisk output everything seems fine, I'm able to mount efi and boot partitions without any problems.
The only thing that I tried was enabling legacy boot flag for EFI partition in fdisk expert options. I have UEFI without even CSM option so there was no change as I already expected.

A few information about my partitioning scheme:
1. EFI partition - 260MB
2. BOOT partition - 200MB
3. SWAP partition - 8GB
3. ROOT partition - 30GB
4. HOME partition - 200GB

EFI isn't encrypted.
BOOT is encrypted with password.
ROOT and HOME are encrypted with separate keyfiles which are located on BOOT partition (decrypted and mounted automatically).

Any ideas how to fix this?

Last edited by Hunter1 (2022-11-06 20:55:41)

cfr · 2022-11-06 20:58:38

Welcome to the forums.

Have you tried arch-chroot into the system, reinstalling grub and regenerating its config file?

Hunter1 · 2022-11-06 22:18:52

Thanks for the help. After reinstalling GRUB on the EFI partition everything woks fine
I'm not completely new to the forum, it's just that my credentials for archlinux forum are saved in keepasxc database on the laptop that I needed to fix so I had to create new account.

I tried to boot laptop once more while connected to this dock and the result is the same - boot loop and later "No boot device". It seems that the this dock is somehow modifying EFI partition during boot.

I've got two more questions related to this issue:
1. Is it possible to somehow protect EFI partition from being modified?
2. My boot partition has "unknown" GPT partition type. I'm not sure if it was like that before. Can I safely change it's type to "boot" using fdisk? I will probably have to recreate initramfs as GUID will change, right?

cfr · 2022-11-06 23:21:38

Hunter1 wrote:

I'm not completely new to the forum, it's just that my credentials for archlinux forum are saved in keepasxc database on the laptop that I needed to fix so I had to create new account.

Hunter1 wrote:

I tried to boot laptop once more while connected to this dock and the result is the same - boot loop and later "No boot device". It seems that the this dock is somehow modifying EFI partition during boot.

That sounds unhelpful. Never having had a dock, however, I have no useful suggestions. (There is a dock for my laptop, but I've never had the $$ for such a thing.)

Hunter1 wrote:

I've got two more questions related to this issue:
1. Is it possible to somehow protect EFI partition from being modified?

Is the partition being modified or is the NVRAM boot entry being deleted?

Hunter1 wrote:

2. My boot partition has "unknown" GPT partition type. I'm not sure if it was like that before. Can I safely change it's type to "boot" using fdisk? I will probably have to recreate initramfs as GUID will change, right?

I *think* you could do this safely, though the 'boot' type may be intended for BIOS booting rather than EFI, but I am not completely certain. As long as you're in a position to boot the live media if you need to and change it back, I think it would be safe, though. You may have to redo grub if the GUID changes. (I'm not sure whether changing the partition type would change this or not.)

HunterretnuH · 2022-11-06 23:29:07

Thanks for the response. I experimented a little bit more and it looks like during this "boot loop" the all UEFI settings are reset to defaults. Secure boot is enabled by default and it causes the issue during boot.

Although I haven't truly reproduced the whole problem as when it first occurred the drive was completely not recognized as boot device. Now even after a few boots with dock connected the drive is still visible as boot device but booting from it still fails as secure boot is enabled. After disabling secure boot it starts without a problem again.

I will probably just have to be careful not to boot this laptop when it's connected to dock, but if anyone has any idea how to debug this issue then please share it.

Last edited by HunterretnuH (2022-11-06 23:31:30)

cfr · 2022-11-06 23:40:35

You could use secure boot, but I admit the hurdles involved have always put me off experimenting. It might depend on the relative annoyance levels of the issue vs. tangling with secure boot.

Arch Linux

#1 2022-11-06 20:54:06

EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

#2 2022-11-06 20:58:38

Re: EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

#3 2022-11-06 22:18:52

Re: EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

#4 2022-11-06 23:21:38

Re: EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

#5 2022-11-06 23:29:07

Re: EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

#6 2022-11-06 23:40:35

Re: EFI boot partition corrupted after connecting docking station

Board footer