Legacy boot / usb boot

Framework Laptop 13
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i’m trying to boot my frame.work laptop from an external USB drive (m.2 drive in a usb enclosure).

the laptop came with windows 10 preinstalled. does anyone know how i can boot in a way that lets me select my usb drive?

i’ve tried F2 and F12. i’ve disabled secure boot – which only leads me to BitLocker. :frowning:

eta: I HAVE FOUND A WORKAROUND!

i’ve been trying to boot with my USB device attached to my laptop – that has never worked. what does work consistently is when i plug my device in AFTER LOADING THE BOOT MENU.

i’ve spent over 24 hours trying to figure this out. i’m so relieved there is a way to consistently work around this for me. hopefully this is useful to someone else.

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Try pressing delete a lot. Otherwise try ever other f keys that you have not already tried.

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Boot menu is F12. Also the devs have acknowledged that there is a bug in the firmware that will not allow you to do this via restart. Laptop must be shutdown for F12 to work. If it still doesn’t work unplug the AC adapter for 35 seconds plug in and try again.

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@ayan glad you found a workaround! As Ryan noted, we have an issue currently with USB on boot and added those instructions here: How do I enter the BIOS on the Framework Laptop?

We’re working on a firmware update to resolve this.

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eta: I HAVE FOUND A WORKAROUND!

what does work consistently is when i plug my device in AFTER LOADING THE BOOT MENU.

ayan: can you clarify: what do you mean by “after loading the boot menu”? Specifically do you mean:

  1. you’re very quickly plugging in when you see the framework logo?
  2. you’re pausing at the device-selector bios screen, and then calmly plugging in?
  3. some other screen?

Asking because I am only able to get to the framework logo - otherwise my only way to see bios screens is via sudo systemctl reboot --firmware-setup (and that’s not a boot-selector, obviously).

In case it’s helpful for debugging I’ll try go come back here and post what my boot menu settings look like in the bios - maybe there’s a particular set of configurations we should have…

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In case it’s helpful for debugging I’ll try go come back here and post what my boot menu settings look like in the bios - maybe there’s a particular set of configurations we should have…

here’s my BIOS screens

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A beta version of the firmware with the fix for being able to get into BIOS consistently after a reboot is landing within the next few days.

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I notice your timeout is set to 1 second. If you are wanting to make it easier to get in there, I’d suggest a longer delay (like 10sec).

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I notice your timeout is set to 1 second. If you are wanting to make it easier to get in there, I’d suggest a longer delay (like 10sec).

Oh good catch, but no change unfortunately.

I just switched the value there to 10, and still no perceptible change in the boot sequence: black screen → black screen with some backlighting → framework logo → my OS (or rather, in my case, LUKS disk decryption prompt).

Every step I can rapidly hit esc, f2, f10, f12 and see no change. Also if I try plugging in my usb key at random points in this sequence (in hope of invoking the workaround above) I also see no change.

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beta version of the firmware with the fix for being able to get into BIOS

@nrp great news! Will this be available via the normal fwupd methods? Or firmware installed some other way?

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Yes, we’ll be releasing through LVFS so that you can get it with fwupd.

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FWIW, I inserted my bootable USB flash drive and then from the BIOS’s Secure Boot menu I added my flash drive’s EFI boot files to the list of known hashes. Seems to have made a difference because when I pressed F12 on reboot it offered me both the internal drive and the USB flash drive as boot options.

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I’ve had good success with a PNY 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive with ventoy (ventoy-1.0.61-windows) installed. I also just tried a no name flash drive with same version of ventoy and it worked. The PNY has always appears in the boot menu (by pressing f12) when I have the USB drive inserted (via USB-a expansion card) before I boot the laptop.

For those who don’t know, Ventoy is great as it supports legacy and UEFI as well as secure boot once you enroll its key. You just create the flash drive per their instructions and then you can put as many ISOs on the drive as you want. You can pick from the list of ISOs at boot time. Ventoy

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I’ll mention this just because it may save somebody else some time who found this page while troubleshooting: Secure Boot was enabled by default, and booting from a USB will probably not work without going into the BIOS and disabling it first (unless you bother to add the hash as Kush mentioned, but I’m just installing an OS then won’t need it again). I spent like an hour trying to figure that out…

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