The operating system installed on a UEFI system doesn't start after a bare metal recovery

Symptom

The operating system fails to boot due to the absence of a boot entry after performing a bare metal recovery.

In a UEFI system, a boot entry is stored in the NVRAM of each machine. If there are configuration changes, the system cannot boot because the necessary boot entry is missing.

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 due to the lack of a boot entry.

This issue is specific to UEFI and is not a problem with AIP. If you replace only the HDD and perform bare metal recovery, the OS can boot successfully.

The affected OS that doesn't boot after bare metal recovery is as follows:

- CentOS6.x
- RHEL6.x
- CentOS7.5 or earlier
- SLES15 / SLED15
- OpenSUSE15
- Debian9~11

* RHEL7.x automatically creates a boot entry after bare metal recovery, eliminating the need for any workaround.
* When restoring to a new virtual machine on Hyper-V by using Hyper Recovery, the default setting for Secure Boot, as with the default settings when creating a new guest on Hyper-V, is "Microsoft Windows," which prevents the creation of a boot entry. On operating systems other than the above, you can boot the OS by either changing the Secure Boot setting to "Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority" or disabling it, which will automatically generate a boot entry when booting Linux system and enables to start OS.

Workarounds

1) Boot Linux-based boot environment 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

For Debian

# efibootmgr --create --label Debian --disk /dev/sda1 --loader /EFI/debian/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

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