I have an HP EliteBook 8560w I’m migrating from Windows 10 to Fedora Kinoite - stock 2016 BIOS (it has a dead CMOS & Primary Battery if it helps any of diagnosis coming up).
When I try to install Fedora Kinoite 44 on it, it goes until the “post-install setup tasks” phase, and then fails when executing ”bootupctl install …”, where it complains about not being able to parse some UTF-8 when attempting to purge other Fedora installs from the boot vars, and subsequently errors out.
There is some weird box characters in the “Notebook Upgrade Bay” and other EFI vars in place of an HD number.
I have full control over the device and have another device on hand in case I need to provide a UEFI Shell or something like that.
Any help would be appreciated.
The Python Anaconda error is “BootloaderInstallationError: failed to write boot loader config”
The laptop has Wi-fi but it appears to be inoperative in Anaconda (No network setup page and NTP doesn’t work).
To whom it may concern: I have fixed the issue regarding the HP EliteBook, after deleting some UEFI Boot variables and clearing the write cache every so often.
At least… that’s how I got it to work somehow.
Replacing the battery is relatively simple. If you do not do that then every time the system is booted after removing AC power the cmos will be at the default settings and the system date/time will be way off.
It also may create other issues that are hard to predict.
Somehow, this is not the case (although the RTC is off - you are correct with that). The BIOS Setup options appear to be not linked with the RTC Battery.
To this date, I haven’t identified any issues that would seem to be caused by the lack of any CMOS/RTC storage - the only real issue I’m having with this install is that:
The subpar BIOS does not boot from shimx64.efi and instead boots from bootx64.efi (despite the insistence of the “restore boot option” menu, which I have set to “Always Continue” for now).
390xx NVIDIA Proprietary Drivers do not work. After uninstalling them and using Nouveau instead, the GPU is no longer as powerful as when it was before. a bloated firefox is definitely something. quadro 100m FTW
Setting the backlight brightness does not work (adaptive brightness?)
If you think any of these are issues that I should make on this forum for now (reminder that this is a relatively new install that I’m actively working on), I can make a thread, but right now I’m having no significant issues that heavily impact actually using Fedora Kinoite. I won’t hesitate to use the discussion forums in case I’m stuck.
That weirdly doesn’t add up, some settings are not at default (most notably whether EFI Boot and TPM is enabled or not) - I think the BIOS settings might be stored elsewhere (especially as the manual only refers to it as a “RTC Battery” and a “CMOS Battery”, although that conflicts with the BIOS itself (as it says that the “CMOS Checksum is corrupted” on boot when AC power is removed).
To be clear, if I ever use this laptop again as a laptop, I’ll definitely get the batteries sorted out, but right now I don’t need the batteries (I have a newer laptop - this one was old but I wanted it to be at least revived).
