Installed Fedora on external drive, but getting "boot device failed" at UEFI

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1

Hello! I could use some help with a snag I’ve hit trying to run Fedora from an external drive. I’ve “dual booted” a number of times in the past but don’t quit have the knowledge to get past this hurdle. It does feel like I’m quite close to getting it to work, however.

I’ve installed Fedora to an external Samsung Thunderbolt 3 drive. My intention was to keep it completely separate from Windows and that, if I unplugged the drive, the laptop would be the same as it always was. When booting, my UEFI shows “Fedora” and “Windows Boot Manager”. When choosing “Fedora”, I get an error that the selected boot device failed. I’ve tried restarting and cannot get Fedora to load (fortunately, my Windows install seems to be fine).

[edit] I’ve tried reformatting the external drive as GPT instead of MBR, and getting rid of any other partitions, but that hasn’t solved it.

Here’s my process:

  1. [edit] I installed Fedora to a USB stick the Media Creation tool
  2. I booted into the live USB and ran the Fedora installer
  3. [edit] I selected automatic partitioning.
  4. I didn’t disconnect the Windows drives during installation. (The installer was not able to see my internal drives anyway because the two internal SSDs were set up in a RAID 0 configuration by Dell, not AHCI. This is an Alienware laptop). So that seemed fine to me.

I’ll try posting some screenshots of the install process and other relevant info.

Other general notes:

  • The “Fedora” entry in UEFI is present regardless of whether or not the external drive is connected.
  • My laptop has Secure Boot enabled.
  • I chose to have the installer encrypt the Fedora installation.
  • Within Windows, there’s a new F: local disk, which is on the external drive. It has “EFI” and “System” folders.
  • The output of “bcdedit.exe /enum firmware” shows that the Fedora entry in UEFI is pointing to that F: drive. The path is “\EFI\fedora\shim64.efi”, as shown below:

Firmware Application (101fffff)

identifier {6e57fc0c-cba2-11ef-a13a-806e6f6e6963}
device partition=F:
path \EFI\fedora\shimx64.efi
description Fedora
isolatedcontext Yes

I appreciate any help!

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2

There are several cases where it has been necessary to switch the SATA config from RAID to AHCI before fedora can see the drives. Some devices are default configured as RAID using the intel raid controller in the mobo.

Note that raid 0 is ‘striped’ and the data may span multiple drives with the risk that a single drive failure will wipe out everything. Raid seems especially risky with an external drive that may not be connected 100% of the time. Disconnecting an external drive that is part of a raid 0 array can cause total failure of the system.

3

Thanks, yeah my goal was to ignore the internal drives completely and still be able to dual boot Fedora by only using the external drive for it. I am not sure if the RAID configuration (set in UEFI/BIOS) for the internal drives has an effect on using the external drive in this way. Maybe it does and is part of the problem?

4

After some further testing, including additional retries, and then using a Linux Mint installer to see what would happen, I was met with an error message about Intel RST being enabled, and being unable to proceed through the Linux Mint install. So the RAID configuration on the laptop itself is likely interfering with even installing Fedora or Mint on the external drive, as you may have hinted at.