Qubes 3.2 installation will not boot on Dell Inspiron 7000 Gaming series laptop

[freddyc...@gmail.com]

I have installed Qubes OS 3.2 to a secondary SSD in an attempt at dual-booting Windows and Qubes. The installation finishes successfully but will not boot after the system restarts following the installation. The UEFI entry is successfully created by the installer, but upon selecting it, tells me that no Operating System has been found, giving me the option to retry, or reboot into the boot menu. I have tried disabling my primary Windows SSD from BIOS prior to installation, and I have followed the steps outlined on the Troubleshooting page. Let me add that the boot folder on the Qubes SSD is appears to be empty, and I cannot follow the instructions on the Troubleshooting page instructing me to copy and rename the xen.cfg and xen.efi. As the folder structure within my Qubes SSD and the installation media do not appear to correspond to the path referenced on the page in question.

Any help with regards to this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers. :)

[awokd]

On Tue, January 30, 2018 5:14 am, freddyc...@gmail.com wrote:
> I have installed Qubes OS 3.2 to a secondary SSD in an attempt at

> The UEFI entry is successfully created by the installer, but upon

Dual booting Qubes isn't really recommended. Better to have a separate
physical machine if possible.

I'm guessing, but I think the problem might be because there is usually
only one EFI partition per system, and it's the one on your primary SSD.
The UEFI programmers probably only ever tested a single drive with Win10,
maybe booting once from an external drive.

You could switch both Oses to grub2/legacy boot and try that way. Another
option might be to do a full backup of your Windows SSD and leave it
enabled during the Qubes install. Select the EFI partition on your primary
drive when installing Qubes. Make sure to do the full backup because it
could break things.

[bill...@gmail.com]

I had a similar issue with installing Qubes 4 rc3 on an external drive for triple boot on a Dell laptop. The response by "yuraeitha" in that thread ("Can I install qubes 4.0 rc3 on an external hard drive") was very informative. My current workaround, at least until I decide to install on the SATA drive, was to install using legacy boot. It means that I can't boot using the grub list, but instead have to hit F12 and choose it from the BIOS boot list as a legacy boot up. It's an extra button push, but not a big hassle.