OS installed on UEFI system does not boot after a bare metal recovery

Symptom

OS does not boot because there is not a boot entry when a bare metal recovery is performed.

In the UEFI system, a boot entry is created in the NVRAM of each machine.
If the configuration changes, booting can not be done because there is no boot entry.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Create virtual machine A.
2) Install CentOS7.x on virtual machine A.
3) Back up virtual machine A.
4) Create virtual machine B.
5) Perform Bare Metal Recovery on Virtual Machine B.
6) Virtual machine B will not boot.

This is a symptom peculiar to UEFI, not a problem on the AIP side.
If only the HDD is replaced and bare metal recovery performed, the OS can be booted.

The OS which does not boot after bare metal recovery is as follows.

– CentOS6.x
– RHEL6.x
– CentOS7.5 or earlier
- SLES15 / SLED15
- OpenSUSE15

*RHEL7.x does creates a boot entry automatically after bare metal recovery,  so no workaround is necessary.

Workarounds

1) Boot CentOSBE and check the partition where the entry is stored after bare metal recovery.

# parted -l
Model: Msft Virtual Disk (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 17.2GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: gpt Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
1      1049kB  211MB   210MB   fat16        EFI System Partition  boot
2      211MB   1285MB  1074MB  xfs
3      1285MB  17.2GB  15.9GB

In this case, there is an EFI partition on /dev/sda1.

2) Execute the following command to create a boot entry.

For CentOS7.5 or earlier

# efibootmgr –create –label CentOS –disk /dev/sda1 –loader /EFI/centos/shimx64.efi

For CentOS6.x / RHEL 6.x

# efibootmgr –create –label CentOS –disk /dev/sda1 –loader /EFI/redhat/grub.efi

For SLES15

# efibootmgr --create --label SLES --disk /dev/sda1 --loader /EFI/sles/grubx64.efi

For OpenSUSE15

# efibootmgr --create --label OpenSUSE --disk /dev/sda1 --loader /EFI/opensuse/grubx64.efi

3) Reboot CentOSBE and boot the OS.

Target Products

– ActiveImage Protector 2016 R2 / 2018 for Linux
- ActiveImage Protector 2018 / 2022 HyperAgent
- Deploy USB