Grub freeze with direct UEFI boot on HP, but works with boot menu

Ask Fedora
1

Grub shows the boot menu then freezes. However, selecting the BIOS/EFI F9 boot menu to select Grub loader, succeeds. The behavior seems similar to problems with HP and secure boot enabled, but I’ve disabled secure boot and no luck.

If I do the BIOS boot menu and pick the option to load an efi file, both shimx64.efi and grubx64.efi boot successfully. I used efibootmgr to create a new entry to boot via grubx64.efi instead of shimx64.efi and both freeze, despite both working via either selecting those entries with F9 boot menu. I also tried grub debug logging, but the log disappears when the boot menu is displayed which is right when it freezes.

An important hint, the initial install did reboot successfully once, so this seems to be also linked to the first-time kernel update with the first boot from disk, or possibly some related boot packages. The latest grub tools released today didn’t help.

I wonder if it has to do with video mode setting to display the menu, which may somehow differ when the BIOS displays it’s boot menu first. I’m not a GRUB or EFE expert by any means, and I’ve run out of things to try, but thankfully can keep booting via F9

System is set up dual boot with a small-ish Windows 10 partition.
Computer is new, HP Pavilion Laptop 15-eh0010nr
I think this is something weird about HP’s UEFI.

2

The following link shows a similar problem just with ubuntu:

So, the problem there is the partition table. Please check if you have GPT or MBR.

In terminal : sudo fdisk -x and have a look what is written under Disklabel type: dos or Disklabel type: gpt

You should have GPT

3

That problem is hanging at grub installation. I’ve found related issues of HP only booting via F9 menu, and they are all resolved by disabling secure boot. Which makes me think this particular HP variant is doing something odd/wrong in the non-secure boot. I think it can support old BIOS booting, but I would rather fix the EFI boot.