rEFInd + Windows 10 on Thinkpad W530 causes overheating and random shutdowns

[Antonio]

Hi,

I am currently using rEFInd on multiple PCs, however, while trying it out on a Thinkpad W530, when booting a Windows 10 installation, it causes the laptop to overheat and shut itself down after a while. This problem does not happen when booting from the standard Windows bootloader or GRUB. Windows 10 is installed in UEFI mode, fast startup is disabled. Problem does not present itself when booting a Linux distribution. Maybe a driver problem?

[Roderick W. Smith]

That's definitely a driver problem within Windows, although it's clearly interacting with rEFInd in some way. My hunch is that a Windows driver is making assumptions about the state of the machine, but rEFInd may have changed it -- maybe a video mode setting, for instance.

Does the problem occur if you launch GRUB from rEFInd and then launch Windows from GRUB? If so, perhaps setting textonly in rEFInd will fix the problem.

It's also conceivable that you need to pass a specific parameter to the Windows bootmgfw.efi boot loader program. The last I checked, neither GRUB nor rEFInd did this; but it's possible that GRUB now does, which could be why it's working but rEFInd is not. What does your GRUB entry for Windows look like? If it's passing an option, you could reverse engineer that with a manual boot stanza in rEFInd.

[Antonio]

Just tested with textonly and cpu temp still gets up to 100+C, causing thermal shutdown after about 30-40 seconds. The problem also still occurs when using rEFInd to launch GRUB and boot Windows. GRUB Windows entry looks like this:

menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager (on /dev/sda2)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-efi-D0FA-62E8' {
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod fat
        set root='hd0,gpt2'
        if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,gpt2 --hint-efi=hd0,gpt2 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt2  D0FA-62E8
        else
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root D0FA-62E8
        fi
        chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}

[Roderick W. Smith]

I'm afraid the only suggestion I have at this point is to look for alternative Windows video drivers. Perhaps there's an update available; or maybe you can get a driver from another source. (Microsoft, video card makers, and chipset manufacturers all release video drivers, which can vary in quality.)

Although it's possible that tweaking something in the way rEFInd sets its video modes might work around the problem, I (or somebody with the right programming experience) would need direct access to your hardware to track this one down. There's also no guarantee that a solution within rEFInd could be found, given that graphics mode support is pretty integral to the way rEFInd works.