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This is more than likely my fault for messing with UEFI in the first place.

tl;dr: I can't boot my Samsung RV520, the boot order is set in the BIOS/UEFI and I can neither boot from USB or DVD. What can I do?

I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 to Ubuntu 20.04. After the installation my laptop would boot to the boot device selection screen and the wrong boot device was highlighted, so I wanted to change that. I couldn't in the BIOS (after a reboot the old boot order was back), so I decided to use efibootmgr.

I ran sudo efibootmgr -o A,B,C, which was "grub", "ubuntu" and "Windows Boot Manager".

This is now the fixed boot order in BIOS. It doesn't boot anything though, but just boot loops. I can still enter the BIOS, but new boot devices don't appear (USB or DVD) and changing the boot order doesn't do anything.

I also can't get to the Boot Menu to select a new boot device on the fly. I tried all the F keys, but the boot menu doesn't show.

  • F2: starts the BIOS (works)
  • F4: should start the recovery, but I removed that partition years ago.
  • F8/12: one of them should show the boot menu, but they don't.
  • F9: If a HDD is connected to laptop it turns off. If no HDD is connected the screen turns black (loop stops) and the CPU Fan starts spinning up.

I removed the BIOS battery over night, which did reset the BIOS, but the boot order persists.

It's a Samsung RV520 running a Phoenix SecureCore Tiano-BIOS. The HDD is GPT formatted and the uefi-partition is sda1 (ubuntu / is sda4).

BIOS2

BIOS3

BIOS4

BIOS5

BIOS6

karel
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dakes
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1 Answers1

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So I got this fixed luckily. In short: I was able to boot by using an undocumented function of my bios which was that F3 always tries to boot from DVD. Using this I was able to boot WinPE and from there I was able to reset my bios.

The procedure is described in detail here. It also describes (in the links) how to obtain the necessary files.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/samsung-series-7-np700z5c-s03ca-my-last-hope.762595/

Thanks to the people at notebookreview.com!

dakes
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