Qubes 4.0 on Dell XPS 13 9360 no longer boots anything!

[Scott B]

I decided over the long weekend to install Qubes 4.0 on my laptop after realizing that I could set up a dual-boot. I know this isn't very security conscious, but I was more concerned whether the hardware would be supported. It turns out I can't use my external monitor and usb keyboard, but that's not the real problem.

I noticed after rebooting that I only had the Qubes boot menu option, Windows 10 was not available. In an effort to set things back to the way they were I removed the Qubes partitions using Ubuntu live from usb. (I don't remember at this point, but I think I may have changed my settings from UEFI to Legacy before installing and then changed it back after removing Qubes.)

Now Windows won't boot and the laptop doesn't allow me to add it to the UEFI boot menu via the BIOS screen. During POST I get "No bootable devices found" even though the SSD shows up in the information screen. I have tried installing a dual-boot with Ubuntu but continue to get the startup error that there is no bootable device. Ubuntu installs, but then won't boot up.

It seems to me, and I'm just getting up to speed on UEFI, that there is something similar to the master boot record missing. I've tried the solutions online that require booting from the Windows 10 installation USB and then attempting to repair my copy of Windows but none of them have worked. I'm out of ideas now and just about ready to format the drive.

Has anyone else experienced this and if so, how did you recover?

Let me know if you need more detailed information and I'll provide it.

[john]

I think this is supposed to only work if the Windows x is installed 1st
in legacy mode, since it sounds like that is not the case ....

I had to play around with grub config files or something ; was finally
able to get it to work , but seems to me once the qubes was installed,
there was no "undoing" grub taking over ...

Maybe you want to start with 3.2 and/or not install the sys-usb (for
your non working external keyboard ) ; but I'm no expert .... :)

[bill...@gmail.com]

I don't know if this will be of any help, but with R4 rc4, I installed it on a Dell laptop and had a similar problem with dual boot (though I installed Qubes on a second external hard drive). The UEFI stuff just didn't work. My solutions was to install Qubes in legacy mode, but left Windows in UEFI. I couldn't use the grub menu to boot, but instead had to hit F12 during boot to bring up the BIOS boot sequence menu. From that, I could choose either Windows or KDE neon from the UEFI list, or qubes from the legacy list. Note that this meant that I had a /boot/efi on the external drive *and* a /boot/efi on my native drive. I haven't installed R4 on my internal drive yet, but plan to do it this weekend.

I suspect that you can probably choose to boot Windows from the BIOS boot sequence menu if you have both legacy and UEFI turned on.

[bill...@gmail.com]

Oh, one more thing. If I *don't* hit F12 during boot, and I have the external hard drive detached, then it comes up with the "no boot device" error. It will boot through the USB using legacy mode by default, but will crump if the drive isn't plugged in. Then I have to hit return (which reboots the machine), hit F12, and choose Windows or KDE neon from the boot list. I'm sure there's a way to tell it to use KDE neon/UEFI by default, but I don't know what it is.

[Mike Keehan]

Hi Scott,

I had the same problem at one stage on my Dell XPS 15. The bios did not
list any EFI boot options, not Windows, not Qubes, and gave the "No
bootable device" message.

I had to use 'fdisk' on a recovery CD to rewrite the partition type back
to the boot partition. I described it earlier on this list to someone
else. I'll try to find the email if you still need to fix your box.

Mike.

[scottb...@gmail.com]

Thanks Mike,

No need to post your solution, although it may help others. I ended up wiping the entire drive and installing Unbuntu 17.10 and putting Windows 10 in a Virtualbox VM.

Scott

[Tomas Vrba]

On Monday, April 9, 2018 at 3:17:04 AM UTC-8, Mike Keehan wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Apr 2018 10:46:04 -0700 (PDT)

> Scott Bwrote:

Hey Mike,

If you could find that email that would be fantastic. I have a similar problem on my Dell XPS 13 9343 as described later in this thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qubes-users/G6lMHyD16xc

Basically, I can only get Qubes 4.0 installed using Legacy boot, which is fine with me, but I can't get it to boot. The machine reboots itself every time it tries to boot Qubes, no matter if I install on an internal or external SSD. I would really love to get it working.

Tom

[Mike Keehan]

>
> Hey Mike,
>
> If you could find that email that would be fantastic. I have a
> similar problem on my Dell XPS 13 9343 as described later in this
> thread:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/qubes-users/G6lMHyD16xc
>
> Basically, I can only get Qubes 4.0 installed using Legacy boot,
> which is fine with me, but I can't get it to boot. The machine
> reboots itself every time it tries to boot Qubes, no matter if I
> install on an internal or external SSD. I would really love to get it
> working.
>
> Tom
>

Hi Tom,

It sounds like you might have a different problem, but anyway, this is
what I had to do to get my UEFI boot working again.

"I had to fix the EFI - for some reason the installer messes up the
EFI partition type on the disk, and the bios doesn't recognise any boot
partition. So I booted from a Linux cdrom and used 'fdisk' to change
the EFI partition type to EFI (which fdisk thought it was anyway!)."

I think the installer messed up the disk identifier string, which has
to be something specific for EFI. 'fdisk' fixed it.

If you haven't used fdisk before, be very carefull! It can easily
ruin your disk partitions irrecoverably.

Best of luck,

Mike.