Fedora 41 Bootloader Fails to Install with Anaconda Error 41.35

Ask Fedora
,
1

Just need some help running.

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.
:white_check_mark: Using the Fedora Media Writer, used Ventoy at some point
:white_check_mark: Manual Partitioning
:white_check_mark: Using the same bootable USB and successfully install Fedora 41 on my other laptop.
:white_check_mark: 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.
:white_check_mark: Ran memory tests on both the RAM and the ROM, and both had good results with no block problems.
:white_check_mark: 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

Thanks for the future help!

2

Looking at your log, the most informative bit of stack trace is this:

Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:   File "/usr/lib64/python3.13/site-packages/pyanaconda/modules/storage/bootloader/efi.py", line 74, in efibootmgr
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:     return exec_func("efibootmgr", list(args), **kwargs)
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:   File "/usr/lib64/python3.13/site-packages/pyanaconda/core/util.py", line 372, in execWithCapture
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:     return _run_program(argv, stdin=stdin, root=root, log_output=log_output,
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:            ~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:                         filter_stderr=filter_stderr, do_preexec=do_preexec)[1]
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:   File "/usr/lib64/python3.13/site-packages/pyanaconda/core/util.py", line 295, in _run_program
Apr 20 06:08:35 localhost-live org.fedoraproject.Anaconda.Modules.Storage[3513]:     output_string = output_string.decode("utf-8")

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.

It looks like a fix was made to Anaconda in January that addresses just this: Handle invalid UTF-8 characters in efibootmgr output · rhinstaller/anaconda@816f494 · GitHub

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)

EDIT: apparently this fix was not deployed as planned into Fedora 42 (per comment in Bugzilla here - 2254801 – pyanaconda.modules.common.errors.general.AnacondaError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 102: invalid start byte). So that would explain why 42 gives you the same error as previous versions.

Question: Out of interest, can you run efibootmgr from a terminal in the live USB environment and post the result here?

3

Thank you so much for your response! I really appreciate it.

BootCurrent: 000A
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 000A,0005,0012,0014,0013,0004,0011,0008,0010,000F,000D,000C,000B,0009,0006,0007
Boot0000* HDD1  BBS(HD,X�,0x0)0000000000001f00000002000000010100000000020000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100
Boot0001* ODD3  BBS(CDROM,X�,0x0)0100000000001f00000002000000010100000000030000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000300
Boot0002* LAN1  BBS(128,X�,0x0)020000000000190000000000000002009b0000d080000000450b00d0db0000d0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000900
Boot0003* LAN1  BBS(128,X�,0x0)030000000000190000000000000002009b0000d080000000450b00d0db0000d0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000900
Boot0004* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,6a1ac495-7b01-42a1-9c51-300a3e84c4c1,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot0005* USB Memory    PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x14,0x0)/USB(0,0)
Boot0006* HDD/SSD       PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1f,0x2)/Sata(0,0,0)
Boot0007* ODD   PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1f,0x2)/Sata(1,0,0)
Boot0008* Windows Boot Manager  HD(1,GPT,25229391-e51e-4201-8b5d-6c842c2765a6,0x800,0x32000)/\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi57494e444f5753000100000088000000780000004200430044004f0042004a004500430054003d007b00390064006500610038003600320063002d0035006300640064002d0034006500370030002d0061006300630031002d006600330032006200330034003400640034003700390035007d00000000000100000010000000040000007fff0400
Boot0009* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,1e6e1fd6-45c6-4b02-a6e0-56a0185cab27,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot000A* Fedora        HD(2,GPT,c3bbe1bc-8618-4e18-bd9a-b10e2cc88779,0x53d5dc,0xf000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot000B* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,965bfc56-7682-49e4-bc82-d0aaf0e52e49,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot000C* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,cbfbe42f-23f8-4d07-86aa-9f22f0235b66,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot000D* Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS     HD(1,GPT,c793b374-7e39-4cfc-bdcb-5ce4ddaf0276,0x1000,0x1fefff)/\EFI\systemd\systemd-bootx64.efi
Boot000F* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,d35e3e07-0fc5-40ac-ae4a-1b91ed440113,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot0010* Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS     HD(1,GPT,5924bc21-7fc5-4ea8-aa68-95af1d1f9461,0x1000,0x1fefff)/\EFI\systemd\systemd-bootx64.efi
Boot0011* Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS     HD(1,GPT,159896f7-1324-4f37-b334-f86e66aba2c6,0x1000,0x1fefff)/\EFI\systemd\systemd-bootx64.efi
Boot0012* debian        HD(1,GPT,0fb0d761-44b5-40c9-a7cb-4f3f8b4d8fef,0x800,0x100000)/\EFI\debian\shimx64.efi
Boot0013* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,1fd85d0d-4405-45ed-91cb-cf33ffdb4aa9,0x800,0x12c000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
Boot0014* Fedora        HD(1,GPT,2649e679-d970-4b31-9daf-1426f319b71f,0x800,0x200000)/\EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi

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?)

Boot0000* HDD1  BBS(HD,X�,0x0)0000000000001f00000002000000010100000000020000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100
Boot0001* ODD3  BBS(CDROM,X�,0x0)0100000000001f00000002000000010100000000030000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000300
Boot0002* LAN1  BBS(128,X�,0x0)020000000000190000000000000002009b0000d080000000450b00d0db0000d0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000900
Boot0003* LAN1  BBS(128,X�,0x0)030000000000190000000000000002009b0000d080000000450b00d0db0000d0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000900
4

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:

efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b 0000
efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b 0001
efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b 0002
efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b 0003

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:

efibootmgr --bootorder 000A,0005,0012,0014,0013,0004,000F,000C,000B,0009,0006,0007

(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?

1 Like
5

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.

Thank you so much for the help!

1 Like
6

Great to hear!

Ah, that makes sense. Useful to know, thanks for feeding back!

1 Like