Trouble booting Qubes in UEFI mode alongside Windows (dual-booting)

[Krasi]

Hi everyone, I hope you could point me in the right direction, I have been able to install Qubes on its own partition and the boot EFI files are on the boot partition along with those for Windows but when I reboot and press F12 to select the boot device I only see the Windows bootmanager, I do not see Qubes but when I run "efibootmgr -v" from a live Ubuntu USB I can see an entry for Qubes so I am not sure why the firmware does not see it and would not allow me to boot it.

I even tried to remove Windows and just leave Qubes but I dont think Qubes wiped the boot partition so it was unable to boot and it would just send me to the firmware (BIOS) settings screen.

I tried to disable UEFI and just use legacy mode to install but Qubes is unable to start the graphics and sends me back to text mode install and is unable to setup the installation partitions correctly under text mode, something about the encryption key missing.

I am trying to get Qubes work on a laptop, using intel core i7-7500U, integrated graphics(Intel HD Graphics 620), 12 GB ram and 500GB SSD.

Any help is appreciated :) Thanks

[Marek Marczykowski-Górecki]

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On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 06:43:40AM -0800, Krasi wrote:
> Hi everyone, I hope you could point me in the right direction, I have been able to install Qubes on its own partition and the boot EFI files are on the boot partition along with those for Windows but when I reboot and press F12 to select the boot device I only see the Windows bootmanager, I do not see Qubes but when I run "efibootmgr -v" from a live Ubuntu USB I can see an entry for Qubes so I am not sure why the firmware does not see it and would not allow me to boot it.

Some firmwares are broken in this respect and boots only Windows... I'd
start with updating EFI. If that do not help, try copying directory from
/boot/efi/EFI/qubes to /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT.

> I even tried to remove Windows and just leave Qubes but I dont think Qubes wiped the boot partition so it was unable to boot and it would just send me to the firmware (BIOS) settings screen.
>
> I tried to disable UEFI and just use legacy mode to install but Qubes is unable to start the graphics and sends me back to text mode install and is unable to setup the installation partitions correctly under text mode, something about the encryption key missing.
>
> I am trying to get Qubes work on a laptop, using intel core i7-7500U, integrated graphics(Intel HD Graphics 620), 12 GB ram and 500GB SSD.

That's really new CPU. I'm not sure if it will be well supported... But
if installer worked, there is a hope.

- --
Best Regards,
Marek Marczykowski-Górecki
Invisible Things Lab
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
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[krasi]

Thanks for the help Marek, I was looking around and found this tool EasyUEFI. Decided to give it a try and found that the qubes partition was hidden... wow

I was able to use the tool to force EFI to boot from the partition by moving it to the top of the list. Weird, not sure why the partition was marked as hidden but I am able to boot into Qubes now and will need to work on installing some drivers now :)

I will report the hardware I am using so it can be added to the compatibility list soon.