UEFI Problem on Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p and ThinkPad T520

[caigner]

I have a Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p and a ThinkPad T520 and wanted to give them a second life with Linux.
I installed Gentoo from a Minimal Installation CD and I progressed nicely to the point where I installed GRUB and rebooted the system.
I was greeted by a black screen with the following message:

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Error 1962: No operating system found. 

I followed the Gentoo Handbook, took care to heed to each advice given regarding the UEFI part.
In the BIOS, which I updated to the most recent version, I activated UEFI and deactived any security setting. I booted the Installation CD in UEFI mode and checked that efivars are available inside the chroot.
I partitioned with gdisk:

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/dev/sda1 ...   2 MB ..... Type EF00 ... FAT32 ... /boot/efi
/dev/sda2 ... 128 MB ..... Type 8300 ... ext2 .... /boot
/dev/sda3 ...   8 GB ..... Type 8200 ... swap
/dev/sda4 ... the rest ... Type 8300 ... ext4 .... /

I also tried it this way:

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/dev/sda1 ... 130 MB ..... Type EF00 ... FAT32 ... /boot
/dev/sda2 ...   8 GB ..... Type 8200 ... swap
/dev/sda3 ... the rest ... Type 8300 ... ext4 .... /

For the last 6 days I have tried any way I could imagine to vary the configuration in the /boot/efi/EFI directory.
Of course I did as mentioned in the Handbook:

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grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot/efi
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I tried the following:

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/boot/efi/EFI/gentoo/grubx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/gentoo/bootx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/gentoo/grub.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/gentoo/boot.efi

/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/grub.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/boot.efi

/boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grubx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/redhat/bootx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/redhat/grub.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/redhat/boot.efi

/boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/grubx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootx64.efi
/boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi

/boot/EFI/gentoo/grubx64.efi
/boot/EFI/gentoo/bootx64.efi
/boot/EFI/gentoo/grub.efi
/boot/EFI/gentoo/boot.efi

/boot/EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi
/boot/EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi
/boot/EFI/BOOT/grub.efi
/boot/EFI/BOOT/boot.efi

/boot/EFI/redhat/grubx64.efi
/boot/EFI/redhat/bootx64.efi
/boot/EFI/redhat/grub.efi
/boot/EFI/redhat/boot.efi

/boot/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/grubx64.efi
/boot/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootx64.efi
/boot/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi

I even installed Linux Mint and after that Ubuntu, both the current versions. Same result:

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Error 1962: No operating system found. 

Nothing worked so far. I am at a loss. I hate it when manufacturers deviate from the UEFI standard.
From my online search (Google), I found out that (probably) Lenovo expects and accepts only certain directory/file names in /boot/efi.

If you have a Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p or ThinkPad T520 (or something similar in age), please let me know, how your /boot/efi directory looks like.

[Banana]

Hello caigner.

do you need a boot manager because of windows?

Here is my disk partition (on a SSD for linux only)

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Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       106G   26G   76G  25% /
devtmpfs         10M     0   10M   0% /dev
tmpfs           3.2G 1000K  3.2G   1% /run
cgroup_root      10M     0   10M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
shm              16G   71M   16G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            15G     0   15G   0% /var/tmp/portage
/dev/sda1       123M   89M   35M  72% /boot

and here is my /boot

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rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  109441 Dec 20 22:38 config-5.4.3-gentoo
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  109452 Dec 20 22:06 config-5.4.3-gentoo.old
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    2048 Dec  1 13:31 efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3817610 Dec 20 22:38 System.map-5.4.3-gentoo
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3815236 Dec 20 22:06 System.map-5.4.3-gentoo.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8876928 Dec 20 22:38 vmlinuz-5.4.3-gentoo

and here is my /boot/efi/boot/

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-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8876928 Dec 20 22:38 bootx64.efi

I followed https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Efibootmgr and do not use a bootmanager

[caigner]

Hello caigner.
do you need a boot manager because of windows?

No, I just want to install Gentoo on this PC. Nevertheless thanks for pointing out that I actually don't need GRUB, so I deinstalled it, and tried a EFI Stub Kernel and used the efibootmgr. Alas, it didn't work. I always get the same error message that no operating system was found.

Here is my disk partition (on a SSD for linux only)

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Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root       106G   26G   76G  25% /
devtmpfs         10M     0   10M   0% /dev
tmpfs           3.2G 1000K  3.2G   1% /run
cgroup_root      10M     0   10M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
shm              16G   71M   16G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            15G     0   15G   0% /var/tmp/portage
/dev/sda1       123M   89M   35M  72% /boot

and here is my /boot

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rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  109441 Dec 20 22:38 config-5.4.3-gentoo
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  109452 Dec 20 22:06 config-5.4.3-gentoo.old
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    2048 Dec  1 13:31 efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3817610 Dec 20 22:38 System.map-5.4.3-gentoo
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3815236 Dec 20 22:06 System.map-5.4.3-gentoo.old
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8876928 Dec 20 22:38 vmlinuz-5.4.3-gentoo

and here is my /boot/efi/boot/

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-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 8876928 Dec 20 22:38 bootx64.efi

The same here, only difference is, it doesn't work on my ThinkCentre.

I followed https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Efibootmgr and do not use a bootmanager

I did the same, but to no avail. This ThinkCentre is as stubborn as a mule.

I decided now to give up on UEFI, changed the settings in the BIOS to Legacy, compiled the kernel without EFI-support and will install the old fashioned (MBR) way. Fingers crossed...

[caigner]

With UEFI turned off, and a traditional MBR installation I was able to boot Gentoo on the Lenovo ThinkCentre M91p.

[Banana]

glad you figured it out. Now have fun with those.

[Spankin Partier]

Hey I just got myself a Thinkpad T420 last week and have since installed Linux Mint on it. I shrunk the Windows partition on it and left the rest for Linux. Here's my drive's layout:

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Disk /dev/sda: 232.9 GiB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x1345b61d

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *         2048    718847    716800   350M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2          718848 233006387 232287540 110.8G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       486845748 488381747   1536000   750M 27 Hidden NTFS WinRE
/dev/sda4       233007102 486844415 253837314   121G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       233007104 486844415 253837312   121G 83 Linux

The default settings in my T420's BIOS was to use both UEFI/Legacy Boot with Legacy First. So I don't know if UEFI was even configured when Mint installed Grub. But it boots into Grub and I can still select Windows if I want (which uses UEFI).

Sorry I'm no expert on efi. This laptop is the first computer I've had the uses it.

These laptops also have an advanced configuration/recovery/testing utilities that can be accessed by pressing the ThinkVantage button while at the POST screen. Not sure it'll help. But might be worth a boo.

[nvaert1986]

I think there's something wrong with your BIOS / UEFI setup, as I've setup various T520 / W530 machines with gentoo.

- Make sure that UEFI mode is the only mode that's enabled on your T520
- Make sure that the Boot Order Lock option is turned off!, otherwise it will reset the added UEFI entries to default every time your reboot

If you're not using an BIOS / MBR partition but only a /boot of 128MB as ESP partition use the command below instead

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory=/boot instead of /boot/efi
grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

I've also noticed once that grub looked for a configuration file on a different location, though then you should see a grub prompt.

This should do it