Ventoy not booting on some specific UEFI HW

[jiri]

Hi there.

First of all, big thanks to Longpanda, I know many people said it too many times, but I really wanted to thank to Longpande for keep developing this tool. It has been a great contribution to the whole IT world.

I work for a company that specializes in supporting supermarkets, we are developing HW and SW to enable stores, restaurants, petrol stations and many others. Some of our specific HW (and some 3rd party HW) struggles to boot in UEFI. Those machines ignore the UEFI standard and have troubles to boot from anything else in some circumstances (large drives) other than Microsoft's bootloader (/EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi).

I have created diagnostics tool for our engineers based on Ventoy using various ISO utilities, BIOS updates, the usual open source tools available and some specific to our machines. To make sure it boots on all UEFI machines, I had to modify the ventoy.disk.img.xz, unpack it, mount it and do the below:

• From /EFI/BOOT/ copy BOOTX64.EFI, MokManager.efi, grub.efi and grubx64_real.efi into newly created folder: /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/
  
• In /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/ rename BOOTX64.EFI to bootmgfw.efi
  
• repack the ventoy.disk.img with xz
  

Once I install the ventoy, it works great. I could only copy the X64 EFI binaries as there is not enough space on the 32MB EFI FAT partition, which is fine as this only affectes our X64 machines (we don't use any other architecture).

My humble question would be if perhaps other people approach you to do something similar as some other BIOSes may ignore the UEFI specs and just look for Microsoft bootloader as the only option. If that's the case, would you consider adding these files so all UEFI firmware would work?

Attached screenshot shows the original /EFI/BOOT/ files on the left and the newly added (copied) /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/ files on the right.

Happy to discuss with you any further.

Thanks for your help.
Jiri

[longpanda]

This is really a peculiar firmware. Your workaround is quite clever and works well.
I have never received any similar reports before, and this is the first time I've encountered such firmware behavior.
The VTOYEFI partition indeed has limited free space. Besides, this is not standards-compliant, so I cannot include this into the official release.

[jiri]

No problem and I understand.

This is a very specific issue probably not seen on any of the usual commercial boards. I don't mind "patching" the EFI FAT image every time before installing/updating Ventoy.

You have my deepest respect for all your work and thank you for taking time to reply.

Thanks