FW16 - Unable to boot from USB or internal HDD

Community Support
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1

Hi folks,

I’m not able to boot into my FW16 at all.

I just did a full wipe of the harddisk while doing a new windows 11 install. It was previously windows 11 but i wanted to do a clean install via the MS ‘Create Media Disk’ thing. So I created the bootable USB and actually installed win11 on my mother in laws pc yesterday. all done.
Today used the same USB and it worked → started to boot and the normal win11 install questions popped up includeing me destroying all existing partitions and then creating a new single one and off we went .. the installation kicked off. i came back after 30 odd mins and noticed that some low level bios screen saying :

  • EFI USB Device (Generic USB Storage) boot failed.

Ok - so win11 install tried a reboot .. and .. this is failing. When i restart with the USB removed:

  • Default Boot device Missing or Boot Failed. Insert Recovery Media and Hit any key then select ‘Boot Manager’ to choose a new Boot Device or to Boot Recovery Media.

Not good.

Maybe the USB has been damaged? sure, lets do this on a separate USB -and- because i don’t want to wait for win11 to be installed on that, lets try a simple, bootable Linux machine (https://www.slax.org/ a 400 odd MB linux flavor. no idea what, just that it’s small) .. and used RUFUS to install this .. and .. same error message.

Have i potentially damaged the bios or something?
I’ve also tried to goto the SYSTEM UTILITY and “Load Optimal Defaults” .. restart .. and same thing.

Can anyone help please?

EDIT:

I tried creating another version of win11 via RUFUS + ISO and then i turned on seeing any bootup text .. and i see this

(INFO) Launching ‘efi\boot\bootx64.efi’…

(INFO Starting Microsoft Windows bootmgr…

(FAIL) Windows bootmgr encoutered a security validation or internal error

Press any key to exit.

OMG ?! what?!

2

Oh damn - so this is a “SECURE BOOT” issue?

I stumbled on this FW thread [GUIDE] Disabling Secure Boot on Framework Desktop for CachyOS (yes, a differnt OS) but it said to

  • SPAM F2 key before the usb/hdd try to startup.
  • We are in the BIOS but the SECURE BOOT sub menu is now unlocked!

From in here i tried to keep it on but clear out the settings / default settings or something? So after I turned it off, it’s looking ok and now boots up!

So do I need to turn it back on again, after the OS is installed?

3

Something may have gotten corrupted when it installed (rare but it happens) or there is something going on with the TPM on the mainboard.

You can try turning it back on but if it does not boot then something is going on that Windows is failing to start over.

Resetting the main board, loading the system defaults, and resetting the TPM is where I would start. Also reinstalling Windows again (sounds frustrating but well worth it) will ensure everything is given a fresh start.

Hopefully there is nothing wrong on the main board level. Secure boot can be disabled, it just means some extra protections are not in place which is not the end of the world. Just be careful about how the computer is used and use a high quality security suite like F-Secure.