Boot Option Restoration/Restored

[ahoneybun]

Issue:

A blue screen that is labeled either Boot Option Restoration/Restored is shown when the drive (Samsung in this case) is selected in One Time Boot. If you click 'Continue boot' is picked you are taken to the bootloader (GRUB) in this testing. Here is a photo of the screen:

System: galp5 GPU: NVIDIA 1650 CPU: i7-1165G7 Drive Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB

Recreate:

1. Install Pop 20.04 LTS
2. Install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
3. Reboot into Open Firmware and select the drive in One Time Boot

[jackpot51]

This might be specific to the galp5. I have this model and can test it out.

[thomas-zimmerman]

I know support has seen this happen on a couple lemp9 and lemp10 systems as well.

[tunix]

I see this screen on my lemp10 every few boots since I've installed Fedora Silverblue on it. I think that, out of 1 of every 3 boots, I see it. Waiting few seconds and the computer reboots by itself and I'm back to GRUB which will take me to the desktop. Let me know if I can give you further data about this error.

[thomas-zimmerman]

@tunix We had another system that was doing this and it took a hardware firmware flash to fix. Have you opened a support case for us to supply a USB image of the firmware to see if that clears this up?

[tunix]

@thomas-zimmerman No, I haven't. I have System76's Firmware Manager installed and received updates before. But I haven't received any updates after a restoration to a previous build was made by System76. Currently I have 2021-07-20_93c2809

Should I still do this? Why is it not available through this Firmware Manager?

[thomas-zimmerman]

Adding the ability to move backwards on firmware release is a decent amount of work and there can be updates around ME firmware versions, where you have firmware breaking changes that can not be downgraded.

There is a command line tool that can reinstall the latest firmware release:

sudo apt install system76-firmware
sudo system76-firmware-cli schedule

[tunix]

Hi @thomas-zimmerman, I already have system76-firmware package installed on Fedora Silverblue. I issued the schedule command and on the next boot, it did flashed the firmware successfully. Hovewer, once I booted the computer back, I saw the Boot Option Restoration screen again. 😞

Is this the latest package btw?

system76-firmware-0.22-1.fc36.x86_64

[aaron-trout]

Where does this screen come from, is it the Samsung SSD producing it? My UEFI boot entry for my Linux install keeps disappearing every now and then and I had no idea why until I noticed this screen flash up for a second on boot today! I'm not using a System76 machine so sorry if this is dirtying up this thread / going off topic (struggling to find anything about this boot restoration screen online). Of the listed hardware the Samsung SSD is the only thing I have in common:

System: galp5 GPU: NVIDIA 1650 CPU: i7-1165G7 Drive Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB

I am using a Gigabyte motherboard with AMD Ryzen and Samsung SSDs (an M2 PCIe and also a regular SATA drive).

[benintech]

Same question here. I too don't have a System76, so this blue screen is definitely not specific to System76 computers. @aaron-trout , it's not from your samsung SSD either, because my SSD is a Western Digital one. I am using an Asus ROG G752VS laptop, with Intel i7 processor. OS is Debian.

Does the blue screen belong to GRUB maybe ?

You can also check this thread, where I explain in which circumstances exactly this blue screen started to appear. There are very few infos on this topic on the web, I really would like to understand where that blue screen came from, and what's its purpose.

[crawfxrd]

It's from grub. I believe this happens when you attempt to boot from the auto-generated entry for the drive. I don't remember the exact repro steps since it's been a while, but I remember finding the string in the grub2 source.

[benintech]

It's from grub.

Thanks, I had a hunch that was the case.

I believe this happens when you attempt to boot from the auto-generated entry for the drive.

In my case the blue screen started to appear after I applied Debian's workaround for buggy UEFI systems that don't look for the bootloader in the right directory. That workaround also installs the bootloader in the "removable media path". Note : in my installation I chose to install the EFI partition on a USB stick. Without that workaround it didn't boot at all, with that workaround it boots but opens the blue screen if I previously started the system without the EFI USB stick plugged in (details here).

[EDIT] Selecting "Always continue boot" gets rid of that blue screen in the subsequent boots.

[erik-msnr]

I am probably late, but I encountered this while doing a migration from CentOS to Rocky / Alma Linux. I was able to solve this through deleting the /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT folder before rebooting into the new OS.