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I have a Dell XPS 13 running Ubuntu 18.04. The system will not boot the signed EFI bootloader grubx64.efi. The system only boots shimx64.efi.

Every time grub packages are updated, it triggers grub-install, which removes the working shimx64.efi boot entry and replaces it with a broken won't-boot grubx64.efi entry.

The error message shown during boot is:

Failed to open EFI\boot\grubx64.efi - Not found
Failed to load image EFI\boot\grubx64.efi: Not found
start_image() returned Not found

This is not because the file is not found, but because the Dell EFI boot does not trust the signature; it only trusts the shimx64.efi signature.

How can I get grub-install to install the correct bootloader?

Stuart Caie
  • 917

2 Answers2

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My problem was that I had the shim package installed, but not shim-signed.

Installing shim-signed fixed my problem.

grub-install now installs shimx64.efi instead of grubx64.efi. Having the package shim installed is insufficient.

Stuart Caie
  • 917
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I had this issue with the XPS 13 7390, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I deactivated Secure Boot, switched to AHCI (from RAID) and broke the Windows on booting,..and when I was able to use Ubuntu in Live mode, I got the error you had during installation.

What worked out for me is to format the whole disk(make sure you did your backup before), and create a small partition of 500MB 'EFI System Partition' as Primary', as demonstrated here: No EFI System Partition option for Ubuntu 18.10

The remaining partitions can be organized in your usual way. Simplest is to have one partition ext4 as root / with remaining disk space. That's it!

More detail: In my case, what I did, is the first time during installation by selecting the Option Erase disk and install Ubuntu, and I got the same error. Then, I saw somewhere saying to select the option Something else and from there, I created:

  • Small partition of 500MB 'EFI System Partition' as Primary' as explained earlier and (you might need to delete it and then re-create it)
  • Created a ext4 partition to use all remaining disk space as root /

Here is the example of how it looks like at the end enter image description here

Then continued with installation, and surprisingly, it worked!

For the disk partitioning, Redhat(https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/6/html/installation_guide/s2-diskpartrecommend-x86) recommends that you create the following partitions for x86, AMD64, and Intel 64 systems:

A swap partition
A /boot partition
A / partition
A home partition
A /boot/efi partition (EFI System Partition) - only on systems with UEFI firmware

A swap partition (at least 256 MB) — Swap partitions support virtual memory: data is written to a swap partition when there is not enough RAM to store the data your system is processing.
aks
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