Enabling UEFI on CF-19 Mk6

Hello,
Today I had an interesting... self-induced headache when I decided to use Windows 10's mbr2gpt feature on my Toughbook CF-19 Mk6. After the Windows feature created the Windows 10 EFI partition and converted the SSD from MBR to GPT I couldn't boot.

Obviously I should have checked this first but long story short, I was switch to my HDD, and clone it back on the SSD in MBR/Legacy mode.

I had gone through several resources online including these:
https://www.win-raid.com/t5690f16-REQUEST-Panasonic-Toughbook-CF-Mk-unlocking-SATA-2.html
http://supportishere.com/uefi-enable-on-panasonic-toughbooks-in-windows-pe/

and to no avail (latter simply doesn't work and former I don't have any special tools to program my BIOS chip as a backup and it seems too risky).

Does anyone here have aother suggestion for enabling to boot from UEFI device on CF-19 Mk6?

 

Install Windows 10 with uefi enabled. It's probably not worth the hassle.

 

I think you missed my point steve.steve, I simply do not have access to enable to UEFI in BIOS. There is no option.

 

I don't have a mk6 to hand to check but the UEFI option is definitely there on a mk7 and not there on a mk5.

Do you have BIOS version V600L14? If not it can be downloaded from link below: might be worth a try if you're on a lower BIOS version.

https://pc-dl.panasonic.co.jp/dl/search?q=&button=&dc[]=002003&p1=111&p2=&oc=&lang=

 

sell mk6, buy mk7

 

Thank you, I currently have V600L10 M51. I will have a look at L14

 

I am getting "This model is not supported" message from the BIOS update utilities for L12 and L14. According to my PC Information viewer, the exact model is
CF-191HYAX1M

 

Its because you have a custom BIOS - designated by the M51 at the end.

Custom BIOSes are prepared by Panasonic to individual company/organization requirements and don't allow updating unfortunately.

 

What a pity! There are UEFI, SATA3, USB-C, 4K OLED and watercooling updates in L14 BIOS.

 

Well, I guess I've stretched machine as fars I can I guess.

 

Unless you extract the bios file it's self and try to do a force install of the updated bios overwriting the original one, but you could brick your machine in the process.

This machine does not support message can even pop up on machines when you try to open certain driver packs, it's a Panasonic safeguard built into the software.

Years ago

 

I do have a USB BIOS flashing kit to play with now, in case something goes wrong, but I'll be a long time until I test and practice on other scrap machines before I try on my CF-19.

 

Another option would be to buy another "rough" Mk6 with working motherboard, swap boards giving yourself the one that will and can update. Then put your motherboard into the rough machine and sell it.

 

That could be an interesting switch, but toughbook aren't exactly common nor cheap around me. I'm in Switzerland now.

 

If your going to do that go with a mk7 or 8 board.
Steve

 

Didn't realize where you were at.


Are all the Mk6 accessory boards that plug in comparable with the Mk7 and 8 motherboard?

Not sure on Mk8, I have seen a few complaints about them being slower than Mk6 and 7.

 

UEFI is a pain. In my experience at least. Trying to use multiple OS's with it is a nightmare.

 

I can't say I agree. GPT allows UEFI, and you can have many partitions. Namely You can choose to have a single EFI partition and many OS systems, or one EFI partition per OSes. As far as you are careful when you install multiples OSes, EFI has a lot more to offer since MBR only allows 4 partitions. For most of my machines I benefit greatly from UEFI (GPT really).

My CF-19 will stay locked Legacy BIOS as well my Lenovo W530 (I can go UEFI in W530 but that means I need to re-configure two of my OSes in a risky way) because they are both working perfectly fine now.

 

The problem is Windows 10 will destroy any other EFI OS's bootloader. No matter what you do. Even if they are on seperate drives entirely.

I had Debian installed on a different drive on my work PC and after every restart, Win10 would kill off grubefi. No matter what I tried, I could not stop it. Windows just cannibalises everything else.

Eventually I just had to format my discs and move to MBR.

 

Not quite true. There is a possibility with older grub as provided by Debian, with a shared EFI with not enough space in the /efi partition. Also, if you have seperate EFI partitions for seperate OSes, there's no chance that W10 will mess up Grub.

 

W10 for an instance will create a ~100MB EFI for itself. It's dangerous to install your linux grub.ef within it, because W10 can cannibalize it during an update. During installation (or in messier way after installtion) of linux, you should create a seperate (>250MB recommended) /EFI to store /EFI/grub.efi and /EFI/youros.efi (OpenSUSE for instance has secureboot.efi) and make sure that the partition is mounted in /etc/fstab first.

We can take this discussion over to OpenSUSE forums if you'd like but there are many benefits of GPT+EFI setup. In my personal case, number of allowed partitions and partition size limit (2TB for MBR).

 

OH yes it will. There's a message on Windows boot where it will say "checking disks" and after that your other boot is gone.

 

Again, depends on how you installed it. I have several machines with GPT/EFI installation of multiple OSes including Windows 10 and linux, and such thing happened exactly 0 times. I boot W10 or linux regularly and this has never been an issue.

As long as you install everything and configure them properly, this shouldn't be an issue. Not to say that linux really comes to "how to do this properly" manual, but this is classical linux beginner problem.

 

For instance you want your boot drive to have a partition table looking like this:

Disklabel type: gpt
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 616447 614400 300M Microsoft basic data <==== Your Linux /boot/grub.efi
/dev/nvme0n1p2 1024000 1228799 204800 100M EFI System <==== Your Windows EFI
/dev/nvme0n1p3 1228800 1261567 32768 16M Microsoft reserved <==== Your Windows "Reserved/Recovery"
/dev/nvme0n1p4 1261568 619592175 618330608 294.9G Microsoft basic data <==== Your Windows system and home
/dev/nvme0n1p5 693016576 1000214527 307197952 146.5G Linux filesystem <==== Your Linux /

You then need to mount this partition by UUID
/dev/disk/by-uuid/3216-F39E -> ../../nvme0n1p1
in /etc/fstab
UUID=3216-F39E /boot/efi vfat defaults 0 0
at highest priority.

What you probably did was trying to shove your /boot/grub.efi in your 100M windows EFI and Windows 10 destroyed it and re-created Windows 10 EFI since Windows would detect it as "corrupt" EFI partition.

 

I also had the same issue one year ago when I swapped a disk between Mk7 and Mk6 and the Mk6 was not booting. I started to investigate this issue and I discovered that the BIOS is UEFI but Panasonic decided to put it in CSM mode and remove the option to change it by end user. Same issue with a CF-H2 Mk1.

What you can do is dump the BIOS and modify it to enable the menu in the IFR list. There are also more advanced menus that can be enabled. There is a PE32 Section Setup that needs to be modified to enable the extra menus.