Refind working on the source machine but not on destination machine

[Dominic]

Hi Rod,

I built a machine which is like my master machine ( Dell 7000) installed refind and dual booted with windows 10 and ubuntu 16.4 linux and everything works fine. But after I save an image using clonezilla and load this machine on the same laptop or another laptop the refind menu does not appear anymore unless I run ./refind-install again on the newly imaged laptop. Unfortunately I cannot do this on 300 laptops.

Can you please help me what am I doing wrong,

Thanks,
Dominic

[Roderick W. Smith]

EFI systems rely on both boot loaders stored on a disk and pointers to boot loaders stored in NVRAM. Thus, cloning a disk's contents, or even physically moving a disk from one computer to another, is not sufficient to make the first computer's boot loader work on a second computer; you must also replicate the NVRAM entry. Ideally, backup/restore software should do this, but I don't know offhand if Clonezilla offers such an option. Maybe it does and you haven't found it, or maybe that option doesn't exist. In the latter case, you're looking at something similar to a "boot coup," so reading up on that may be helpful. In particular, using the fallback.efi/fbx64.efi tool may be a useful workaround:

http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/bootcoup.html#fallback

If you set this up correctly, then the target system is likely to detect the fallback loader at EFI/boot/bootx64.efi, that program will read rEFInd's BOOT.CSV file, and a rEFInd entry will be automatically created the first time the computer boots. This solution, however, relies on the firmware to actually boot the fallback loader. Some might not do this automatically.

Another option is to create a script you can run in Linux after you run the Clonezilla restore on the target system. This script would use efibootmgr to add the entry for rEFInd. If you're running Clonezilla from a script, adding such a call would make the restore process automatic.