Sony VAIO and UEFI – what a lie

Sony seems to believe they can ignore the UEFI standards. As I have written in the previous post on booting, Sony messes up the EFI boot setting on every boot.

I did a hard core test, that is *remove* every entry, remove the boot order, everything.

Rebooting then I got

BootCurrent: 0007
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0005,0007,0008
Boot0005* Sony Original	        HD(1,...)File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)
Boot0007* Windows Boot Manager	HD(3,...)File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)
Boot0008* Windows Boot Manager	HD(5,...)File(\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi)

And the same happens when you change, add entries. ALl new entries are just added at the end, but there is no way to access the UEFI boot manager, as the VAIO Bios disregards timeouts, bootnext settings, everything.

Furthermore, it seems that because the partition 1 is hidden and not boot, that the 0005 entry is not actually used. I replaced it with the grubx64.efi, but that did not help.

That means, one has to replace \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi on the third partition. But this is dangerous as Windows might change that at will.

Better option

Fortunately, we can do slightly better! If one turns of windows fast boot with bootmgr /h off or similar, then there are only three entries:

BootCurrent: 0008
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0005,0008,0000
Boot0000* Windows Boot Manager	HD(3,389800,82000,54d2400d-15ad-407d-9d60-61c60576cc56)File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)WINDOWS.........x...B.C.D.O.B.J.E.C.T.=.{.9.d.e.a.8.6.2.c.-.5.c.d.d.-.4.e.7.0.-.a.c.c.1.-.f.3.2.b.3.4.4.d.4.7.9.5.}....................
Boot0005* Sony Original	HD(1,800,1e5000,d8406f50-1236-4c46-a81d-3dc344783e6a)File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)
Boot0008* Windows Boot Manager	HD(5,44b800,c8a2c40,d6156b9b-95d4-4864-ade4-ff813101ffcd)File(\EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi)

Thus, the following procedure at least gives me safety that Windows will not mess around (hopefully) with my grub boot code:

• reinstatiated the original HD(3,..)bootmgfw.efi which is the one shipped with windows
• create a new directory in the Windows drive hd(5) in \EFI\Boot and copied grubx64.efi there, renaming it to bootx64.efi

After that, the laptop boots from the 0008 entry of the efi boot list, which is the grub one.

Let me finish with a big big fat WARNING: every time grub is updated, make sure to copy the new boot loader to the above mentioned location, otherwise you might find yourself (as I did) with a grub that does not boot. And then you should know the grub emergency console quite well.

Let us hope that Sony at some point fixes this incompatiblity.