Dell E5430 BIOS menu says "File System Not Found!" when I click "Add Boot Option"

Tell us more what was done on the machine. 

Did you reinstall OS or put Linux on it 

Did you change sata mode ( AHCI_ 

Most of important : if you changed to Legacy and than installed your OS, BIOS won't detect a File system. 

 

I did a lot of things to this machine

I was swapping out the hard drive / SSD frequently to boot into various operating systems. I expect that some of the operating systems used UEFI booting and some used Legacy/CSM booting.

While trying to debug the problem I switched the SATA mode from RAID to AHCI.

I have both Debian 10 (with non-free firmware) and Fedora 34 DVDs burned. I would like to be able to boot to one of those. From there I could install a UEFI-friendly version of GNU/Linux, right?

Because in those menus UEFI expects to have some kind of bootable medium (HDD, SSD, or USB) visible. You are looking for installed bootloaders and setting the order, not telling it what disks to try and boot from. You already have whatever bootloaders your system can find set up. site

UEFI is intelligent enough to be able to scan hard disks and USB sticks for bootable systems. It looks for FAT partitions that contain EFI System Partition data.

If you do not have a disk or USB stick with a valid EFI bootloader then you will need to boot from one, install an operating system, and then I would expect you to see options in those menus.

Those menus are nowhere near as "dumb" as BIOS systems were, where they simply showed you a list of disks they could see and expected you to know which had bootable disks. Modern systems can go out and look for proper bootloaders installed on the disks so you know for certain that you are booting an operating system.

In "Legacy" mode it may well be looking for a valid MBR and active partition on its boot disks before it shows you anything.

AditiyaPanday51,

How would you recommend that I boot from a DVD to install an operating system in UEFI mode? I seem unable to boot from a DVD (either internal or in a USB DVD drive) when my machine is in UEFI-only mode with Secure Boot enabled.

Is there a way to tell the BIOS that I would like it to search the DVD drive for an UEFI-compatible bootloader (a ".efi" file)? Alternatively, could I possibly access a UEFI-shell and manually launch the ".efi" file?

Yes you can use it.

Secureboot should be turned off 

If you want to do so many experiments with different Operating systems

Why bother removing SSDs . Get  a large SSD ( 1TB or more) Partition it 

I have running, Windows 8.1 /windows 10 /UBUNTU /Debian all from one SSD 

XPS_Man,

Even with Secure Boot disabled I am unable to boot from a DVD (either internal or connected to a USB DVD drive).

UEFI mode is enabled; Secure Boot is disabled. The Linux DVD does not appear in the list of boot options when I boot while pressing F12.

Linux DVD ?? 

Who uses them now ??  

Most of these DVDs had Legacy support on them

Create one UEFI based flash drive 

You can use RUFUS or UNETBOOTIN to create one

 

In response to AditiyaPanday51 and XPS_Man,

I have a followed these instructions:

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-id/000124391/how-to-enable-boot-from-dvd-option-with-uefi-boot-mode-enabled-windows-10-8-1-8

(the section under "UEFI BIOS")

When I follow the instructions in step 5 ("Go to the 'Boot Sequence' tab in the BIOS and select Add Boot Option.") the pop-up that is mentioned in step 6 doesn't appear. That's when I get the "File System Not Found!" error.

It's as though BIOS can't see the DVD drive for some reason.

whatever is on that DVD is not supported by BIOS

Again try USB drive 

Done this Hundreds of time 

USB never fails

I have the same issue, my search engine brings me to this article, and I have to read a lot of useless back-and-forth discussion repeating the same thing, in the end to see that no real answer has been provided to the original question. 

I find it disturbing when tech support experts (even maybe external, volunteer ones) do not read the question and try to help with standard, or unrelated answers. 

One of the answers says "UEFI is intelligent enough to be able to scan hard disks and USB sticks for bootable systems. It looks for FAT partitions that contain EFI System Partition data". This is just what I expect it to do, and which it does not do. I have used multiple utilities from bootable USB the check my 1 TB internal 2.5" SSD, and these tools tell me that there is GPT with the UEFI partition, I can see the internal directory structure of the UEFI partition, but the BIOS claims it cannot find the disk. When I go to the 'Boot Sequence' tab in the BIOS and select Add Boot Option to add one from the internal SSD, I get the "File System Not Found!" error. That's the core of the issue. 

@6alactica​ 

Hi,

I am facing the same issue - exactly as you stated: "When I go to the 'Boot Sequence' tab in the BIOS and select Add Boot Option to add one from the internal SSD, I get the "File System Not Found!" error."

I tried a lot of things but nothing has helped me so far.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue?

I know I accidentally try to install fedora linux on my dell laptop in MBR  manner and it created a new partition which is called "MBR boot". I am not sure what this partition is for in my case when I am using UEFI partition.

@6alactica, were you able to fix the issue? Thanks!

Ok, just to let you know, I fixed the problem in the end. It looks to me that the problem was in the disk flag "pmbr_boot". When this flag is set the UEFI firmware does not see the EFI partition - presumably it is not even looking for it.

Original

root@fedora:/# parted

(parted) p

Model: ATA Micron 1100 SATA (scsi)

Disk /dev/sda: 512GB

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B

Partition Table: gpt

Disk Flags: pmbr_boot

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags

1 1049kB 473MB 472MB ntfs Basic data partition diag

2 473MB 578MB 105MB fat32 EFI System Partition boot, esp

3 578MB 595MB 16.8MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres

4 595MB 81.6GB 81.0GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata

5 81.6GB 82.2GB 570MB ntfs hidden, diag, no_automount

7 82.2GB 82.2GB 1049kB bios_grub

6 82.2GB 105GB 22.6GB

9 105GB 175GB 69.8GB btrfs

8 175GB 512GB 338GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata

This can remove the flag

(parted) disk_set pmbr_boot off

After

(parted) p

Model: ATA Micron 1100 SATA (scsi)

Disk /dev/sda: 512GB

Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B

Partition Table: gpt

Disk Flags: 

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags

1 1049kB 473MB 472MB ntfs Basic data partition diag

2 473MB 578MB 105MB fat32 EFI System Partition boot, esp

3 578MB 595MB 16.8MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres

4 595MB 81.6GB 81.0GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata

5 81.6GB 82.2GB 570MB ntfs hidden, diag, no_automount

7 82.2GB 82.2GB 1049kB bios_grub

6 82.2GB 105GB 22.6GB

9 105GB 175GB 69.8GB btrfs

8 175GB 512GB 338GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata

(parted) q