Can´t boot to Fedora 40 after BIOS update

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1

Hello everyone,

I have been facing a serious problem since this afternoon when I did a BIOS update on my new Lenovo Yoga Pro 7i (14IMH9) machine: I can no longer boot into my Fedora installation.

I bought this machine 3 months ago:

  • Yoga Pro 7i 14¨
  • Core Ultra 7 155H
  • 32G RAM
  • 1TB SSD

I am still running Fedora, although I kept Windows 11 ¨in the background¨ in dual boot by reducing its partition to the minimum and leaving the rest to Fedora.
For the BIOS update I went through Windows 11, so I rebooted into Windows 11, downloaded the ¨.exe¨ file for the BIOS update, ran the update and waited for it to finish and the PC to restart.

The PC has therefore restarted on Windows 11 without any problem, however it is impossible to restart on Fedora.
When restarting I remain stuck:

  • either on the PC boot logo (YOGA) if I do nothing and Fedora is the first option in the UEFI boot
  • or, if I manually select the Fedora boot entry by pressing ¨Fn+F12¨, I end up on a black screen with a dash of 8 in the top left corner and nothing.

The only solution each time is to force the shutdown of the machine with the on/off button.

I searched the net to find similar topics, and indeed there are similar cases with other machines, but apparently no solutions…

Among other things, I tried to boot on Live ISOs to try to troubleshoot in chroot:

  • Live ISO Fedora does not boot (frozen black screen - underscore top left corner)
  • Live ISO Debian ditto
  • Live ISO EndeavourOS boots on the installer (found thanks to a similar topic of problem on Fedora in English where one of the participants claimed that he had finally installed Endeavour and that it worked)
  • Live ISO Ubuntu boots on the installer

And there I am perplexed… Endeavour which is based on Arch boots - so… But Ubuntu which is based on Debian boots while Debian does not boot… Fedora either….
So I assume that the problem would come somewhere from GRUB or the initramfs, but I don’t know what…

I also tried to pass some options to the command line of the Fedora Live ISO coming from the other distributions that boot:
i915.modeset=1 nvme_load=yes
acpi=off nomodeset
But without success.

In any case it is a very big problem for me because this Fedora serves as a work tool and I have to be operational for Monday otherwise I will face big problems.

So I thank in advance anyone who can contribute, whatever the contribution, especially during this holiday period.

2

Hello GOGI,

I might be wrong, but it may have to do with keys, boot signatures and secure boot. Did you try to disable secure boot for a test?

Good luck!
Thomas

3

Hi Thomas,

Thank you for your answer, my bad I forgot to precise that I disabled Secure Boot (and Fastboot inside Windows, it´s known to possibly cause some unforced issues with dual booting, don´t ask me how :slight_smile: ) a long time ago because I used to use systemd-boot instead of grub.

4

Technically you could downgrade the bios again to the previous version?

5

Nope… Technically Lenovo doesn´t fu****g provide previous versions once they upload a new version… That´s what made me upset with them today.

6

If the issue is related to kernel support, then getting a Fedora nightly might help in getting a system with the latest updates:

https://openqa.fedoraproject.org/nightlies.html

7

You mean I should give it a try and see if nightly Live ISO would boot?

8

Yes sir!

9

I´ll give it a go right now and report if succeeded or not.

10

Well I tested a Fedora nightly build for Live ISO and it didn’t work… It accesses to the grub menu and then when selecting install option it gets stuck on the same black screen with underscore in the upper left corner…

11

Try removing the rhgb and quiet kernel options in grub.
Do you see more any messages as the system boots?

12

I nave seen issue after a BIOS update that are only fixed by first telling the BIOS to use default setting then putting back my custom changes.
Maybe give that a try is still having problems.

13

Already tried, and no there is nothing but an underscore in the upper left corner, the boot process obviously hangs there.

I still don’t get in my mind what can be related to this as distribs like Ubuntu or Arch/Endeavour start fine but Debian doesn´t and obviously erverything based on RHEL, because they all use grub and kernel initrd and vmlinuz images…

14

Tried it too… I have a little hole on the back of the laptop where one need to put a needle to reset it. I did it today but no success.

15

When you see the underscore, it is possible that the system is actually booting but you’re not seeing any output because of a video issue. In that case you would be able to switch to a TTY with e.g. ctrl + alt + f2.

Also the suggestion from @barryascott might normally give you some degree of textual debug information, removing the rhgb and quiet parameters from the kernel line.

16

Yeah that’s what I first thought too, so I tried to switch to any other console with Ctrl+alt+FX but no success…

Tried to remove rhgb and quiet from kernel cmdline to make it more verbose… But the machines obviously hangs at this very moment and that’s it, nothing left but a very black screen that lets you only the option to push on/off button to hard reset the laptop.

17

That may do what I am thinking is a reset to defaults.
But usually you enter the BIOS and select the load defaults button.

My guess would be it relates to either the kernel version or kernel config
which will be different for each of the distros.

18

About the hole that’s correct, it does a reset to defaults if necessary as everything is locked up inside the laptop (battery, ram soldered…).
Anyway I also tried all the possible tweaks even in BIOS.

I’m convinced too that it is a matter of kernel version and/or config, especially with graphic card module… Here are the changes that have been made in the BIOS update :

Latest Version BIOS fixed all merged issues from previous.

Version

N9CN28WW:
BIOS Notification:
1. Fixed
  1) NA

2. Add
  1) NA

3. Modified
  1) Update BKC to MR1.
  2) Update WIFI 6E control method.
  3) Modify vswing level for OLED Panel.

EC Notification:
  1) Modify the UCSI Version to Fix the issue of UCSI commands - PPM-Reset fail.

I suspect this has something to do with ¨vswing level¨ but at this very point I’m absolutely not competent to deal with that.

EDIT : I forgot to mention that I tried to go with a previous kernel version in chroot (6.8.5) and it didn’t do the maths.

19

In addition to the above, try adding a 3 at the end of the kernel command line to boot to a text console.

20

Did it too George, and it didn’t help unfortunately.
As I keep saying, the boot process seems to completely hang at this point with a black screen and non-blinking underscore in the upper left corner. The only solution is to force shutdown by keeping pressed power button.

By the way, I just succeeded to get back to previous state and make my install work as I managed by chance to find the older version of BIOS exe file through a Lenovo forum… To be precise, you can’t find of course previous versions on Lenovo’s official sites of course… So I found an answer from a guy in one of these forums where he was providing a link to a download page, the only thing I had to do was to change the name of the file at the end of the link… :

[https://download.lenovo.com/consumer/mobiles/n9cn26ww.exe]

I downloaded and reverted back to previous version my BIOS, and everything is working like a charm as it used to be, my install of Fedora started immediately, and other rhel related live iso do correct boot processes…

So everyone be really careful with this, because Lenovo does not provide support for Linux on this type of machines, they are not certified for Linux, and they do not provide previous versions of BIOS on their main sites (or at least it is not explicitely mentionned) if something goes wrong.

As far as I’m concerned I have already reported this to Fedora and RedHat maintainers and I’ll give them the solution too, as it is a huge regression in my opinion. Hoping they will find a fix soon.

Thanks to all people who participated here, and fell free if you have any further questions.

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