I’m trying to install Fedora 41 on my old laptop
Model: Toshiba Satellite Dynabook B65/Y
RAM/ROM: 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD
Processor: Intel i5200u
Graphics: Intel HD 5500
Already tried the following basic troubleshooting. Using the Fedora Media Writer, used Ventoy at some point Manual Partitioning Using the same bootable USB and successfully install Fedora 41 on my other laptop. Tweaking with UEFI/BIOS i.e. Correcting the date, turning TPM and Secure Boot on/off, enabling/disabling VT-x and VT-d, using UEFI, Legacy, UEFI etc. Ran memory tests on both the RAM and the ROM, and both had good results with no block problems. Successfully installed the Debian, Ubuntu 24.04, Pop_OS!, Manjaro and Endeavor OS. (Just a side, I used Fedora Media Writer to flash all of these OSes to my 8GB flash drive, and they worked just fine. Kudos to the developers!)
However, what I didn’t do was tweaking grub, and clearing the nvram, as I am not familiar with how it works.
I also tried installing older versions of Fedora (38, 39 and 40 even Everything ISO, Silverblue and Kinoite), even tried installing 42 (with it’s new installer). With no luck, I still receive the same error on installing Fedora. Always showing anaconda 41.35 exception error See the full log here: anaconda 41.35 exception error
So the anaconda code makes a call to efibootmgr, assumes that it will get a result that is UTF-8 encoded, then throws because the result is not valid UTF-8.
However, I’m surprised then that you see this issue with Fedora 42 as well as with 41, because that fix looks like it was included in Anaconda for Fedora 42 (it’s included in this changelog: Release Anaconda 42.23 · rhinstaller/anaconda · GitHub)
Upon checking I can see some unreadable lines. (Totally unrelated question, but why can I still see my previous entry from my Pop_OS! and Windows, can I delete them?)
Right, I bet these are the problem. (Of course, it would still be better for Anaconda to apply the proposed bugfix so that these do not cause the installer to fail.)
They all refer to BBS which is “BIOS Boot Specification”, i.e. the old-style pre-UEFI boot, often called “Compatibility Support Mode”.
I was wondering whether going into legacy boot mode would remove them, but it sounds like you already tried that when installing the OSes. So it seems that removal needs to be done manually.
Do you have a need to use Legacy mode in future? If not, I would suggest that you can delete these:
Yes, you can delete them using commands like the above.
You probably also want to set the BootOrder to exclude them. So (assuming you’re going to delete 0008, 000D, 0010 and 0011), update the BootOrder with:
(Here, I chose the new boot order just by taking the existing one and removing the Windows and Pop!OS entries from it.)
Also, am I right in thinking that you don’t yet have a working Fedora install? If so, then the 8 “Fedora” entries are probably left over from your aborted installs and probably should be deleted too?
Thank you again for the response! I deleted the following lines, together with the other boot files from my previously installed versions of Fedora and other OSes.
I was able to successfully install Fedora 42 KDE on my system without any problem.
One thing that I notice was that when I deleted the boot entries, they get automatically removed from the boot order.