CentOS v8 to AlmaLinux v8 upgrade fails to boot UEFI system

I have completed about a dozen CentOS v8 to AlmaLinux v8 upgrades without any issues. These have been using BIOS/Legacy boot mode. When I run the same upgrade on a CentOS v8 server using UEFI, after the reboot, the server cannot find the boot drive. It seems that something was not copied correctly or linked correctly for UEFI. Any suggestions? Thanks.

I have no experience working with UEFI, sorry. I am replying in the spirit of letting you know someone has at least looked at and replied to your post.

@jack , @MartinR , you guys got any ideas?

Sorry, not a lot of ideas here. I’ve done a couple of installs, one to a VM, one to a USB stick to drive a laptop and a conversion (again a VM). My VMs run under KVM/Qemu, basic out of the box on a C7 machine.
I did have a problem with the laptop. When I upgraded from beta to release it screwed up the boot but I’m afraid I just rebuilt as it was a test machine only. If it helps the boot disk looks like:

# ls -l EFI/*
EFI/almalinux:
total 5444
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users     122 Mar 15 18:44 BOOTX64.CSV
drwxr-xr-x. 2 XXXX users    4096 Mar 15 18:28 fonts
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users    7256 Apr  3 17:33 grub.cfg
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users    1024 Apr 20 13:50 grubenv
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users 1900112 Mar 15 18:28 grubx64.efi
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users 1171320 Mar 15 18:44 mmx64.efi
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users 1240144 Mar 15 18:44 shimx64-almalinux.efi
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users 1237503 Mar 15 18:44 shimx64.efi

EFI/BOOT:
total 1568
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users 1237503 Mar 15 18:44 BOOTX64.EFI
-rw-r--r--. 1 XXXX users  362968 Mar 15 18:44 fbx64.efi

(BTW, ignore the XXXX:users, I’m looking at this on my main system and that reflects the mounting user, it’s a FAT partition and has limited ownership details.)

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I verified that when installing AlmaLinux from scratch, it configures EFI correctly. I suspect something needs to be added to almalinux-deploy.sh to handle migrating the EFI configuration correctly. I’ll reinstall CentOS v8 and migrate to AlmaLinux and check that all those files are there.

@fwarnke thanks. Can you file this on the bug tracker as well https://bugs.almalinux.org?

Yes, I will file this on bug tracker. Looks like something has now changed with almalinux-deploy.sh. After running the deploy script and a reboot, the AlmaLinux boot menu comes up “System setup” and it launches “fwsetup”, which in turn launches the server’s BIOS configuration utility.

Filed this on bug tracker. No response so far.

I can confirm, running a Nutanix uEFI VM CentOS8 after running script, system will not boot into Alma. Does not see the Grub or any Bootable Drive.

Looks like the latest almalinux-deploy.sh has fixed the issue with UEFI.