Booting UEFI USB stick on a Toshiba laptop (InsydeH20 bios)
If you have InsydeH2O bios, you may have some trouble booting from UEFI flash drive (with linux or Win8 or higher).
There is a ton of advice, like to switch to CSM boot mode, but that defeats the point of UEFI. So some tips for you:
To make UEFI flash drive, you don’t need any special tools, you just need FAT32 formatted usb drive with an active partition and EFI folder on it. So for example, I wanted to try Ubuntu 15.04 on my machine (Toshiba Qosmio X70-A-12X) so I did the following:
- Formatted my trusty Kingston 2GB drive with diskpart (select disk X, clean, create partition primary, select partition 1, active, format quick fs=fat32
- Mounted Ubuntu iso with Windows 8.1, copied all the files from it to the USB.
- Thats it… (UEFI rocks)
To boot this drive after many hours of trying, sadly only because of a bug:
- Reset your bios to default settings!
- Leave Secureboot ON
- Turn Fastboot OFF
- Save settings with F10
- Hold F12 while booting to get to the boot menu, and select your USB.
- It should boot!
So whats the trick?
My BIOS was not working correctly, and it didn’t register my USB drive. In the F12 menu, it just said USB when it should have said USB Kingston DataTraveler so I thought I haven’t made a bootable USB or that I must use CSM (which you shouldn’t ever use).
Hope this helps someone.
On a side note: Ubuntu 15.04 (daily) is the only distro that works on my notebook. (14.04, 14.10 and Fedora 21 and 22 alpha freeze after a few minutes of usage - probably kernel issues)