ASUS UEFI (friendly) EFI USB - No luck... (Flashing LSI9211-8i HBA from IR to IT)

Software & Operating Systems
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Hi all -

I have a need to boot an EFI shell and on the Asus Zenith Extreme, I’ve basically got Secure Boot set to ‘Other OS’ (which disables it…). However, my USB just does not ‘boot’ the shell.

To start, I created a 500MB FAT partition on a 16GB Sandisk flash-drive.

I’ve grabbed the Github Tianocore precompiled v1 shell, renamed it to ShellX64.efi. To be on the safe side, I also have a copy as Shell.efi placed in -

  • USB root
  • /boot/efi
  • /efi/boot

Even though the USB is detected by the BIOS as ‘UEFI: SANDISK’ - I can’t boot it from the boot-options, nor from ‘Exit > Launch EFI Shell from USB devices’ - I just get the same Warning that says that I should either disable Secure boot or copy the keys across.

Thoughts?

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Just gave this a try, will confirm in the morning

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No luck… hmm.

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Try this guide. I believe this is the one that I followed when I needed to flash my 9211. The key difference here is using rufus to create a bootable Dos disk. Oh and one other note is to stick with USB 2.0 if you can.

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OH USB2??

I tried the Rufus DOS method but will go through your link. I got an error that lead me to saying I must go the EFI route hmm. Thanks @Whizdumb

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Hope it works for you. Let us know. Cheers!

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Finally, managed to hunt down a version of Tianocore that would boot and run the correct version to flash the LSI9211 card.

https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/UDK2010.SR1/EdkShellBinPkg/FullShell/X64/Shell_Full.efi

This is one of the earliest branches in the repo (well, dated at least), and anything newer gives you an InitShellApp: Application not started from Shell when running sas2flash.efi.

I also used a 4GB USB2 stick, formatted in linux with fdisk with a 500MB primary partition, made active (bootable); then formatted mkfs.vfat as FAT16. The EFI shell was then copied over to /efi/boot/bootX64.efi.

The other weirdness in the Asus UEFI is that going to Exit > Launch EFI Shell from USB devices doesnt work - instead, find the UEFI: ...listing under boot, matching the USB’s capacity and boot that instead.

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I’ve shared a public repo on how to go about this here - thanks so much @Whizdumb

CC @wendell @SgtAwesomesauce

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