For example, if the OS boot entry is somehow lost, without EFI Shell, you probably need to boot off of a Linux live CD or something to recreate a boot entry. If EFI shell is available, you don't need to do that. You just simple bring up the shell, and mount the EFI partition to execute the OS boot image.
Another example is that if you want to update PCIe card firmware image such as RAID card firmware before installing an OS, you have to use Fujitsu's Update Manager Express to do the update. It will take long time as it will update the whole system (BIOS, iRMC FW, PCIe FW, etc.). If you have EFI Shell, you can run EFI utilities to update firmware, and it will take less time.
Although Fujitsu disabled EFI Shell, there is still a way to use EFI shell on PRIMERGY servers.
Here are the instructions.
- Download the EFI shell binary from tianocore.
- Format your USB flash drive in FAT32.
- Create the \efi\boot folder.
- Copy the downloaded binary to \efi\boot, and rename the file to bootx64.efi.
- Boot the PRIMERGY server off of the USB device in UEFI mode.
You can extract the USB EFI shell environment as a HDD image, and mount it via iRMC Remote Storage. It's handy.
I put EFI utilities like LSI's storcli, Intel's bootutil, etc. to this, and created a HDD image as "efitools.img", so I can flash Fujitsu RAID firmware (ROM file), or change the boot mode (PXE or iSCSI) for Intel-based network cards on any PRIMERGY servers.
2 comments:
I'm trying to get this to work on Fujitsu TX200 S6 and no avail. It seems there's some small details missing or something has changed since. I've updated to latest BIOS (R1.15.2799.N1), maybe that was a mistake?
All I get is "insert bootable drive" etc.
Is there a limit to the size of the USB-drive or is there something very particular about how to format the drive?
Hi Mio Taalas,
I don't think TX200 S6 supports the UEFI mode, so you cannot launch EFI Shell on TX200 S6. To use EFI, I believe you need PRIMERGY S7 or later generations.
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