UEFI boot on HP machine
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I reinstalled Windows 10 on my HP convertible notebook in late December, and took the opportunity to encrypt the system drive. Now I get a blue-screen errro 0cx000000f "Your PC/Device needs to be repaired A required device isn't connected or can't be accessed" whenever I reboot. This screen tells me to press the Windows key for UEFI Firmware Settings, and by doing that, then presssing F9 for boot options, I can go through a series of screens selecting Boot From EFI File, Veracrypt and DcsBoot.efi which gets me to the Veracrypt password entry and starts Windows. But how do I stop this happening?
I see that Veracrypt 1.23 Hotfix 1 made some changes aimed at fixing UEFI problems in HP laptops but I am running 1.23 Hotfix 2 and it has not fixed the issue.
I found an old thread from 2017 recommending renaming boot files, but also advice taht this is dangerous, and i would not want to take steps incompatible with the latest updates.
There are indeed many use cases that are not handled correctly by 1.23-Hotfix-2 changes and I am currently working on a new approach to solve the remaining problems (as you can see in the latest commits to the source code repository). I should be able to release 1.24-Beta1 by the end of this week that will contain these news fixes.
Meanwhile, I will prepare a tool for fixing the problem you are encountring since it is a commun situation. After running this tool, you will be able to boot normally without the need of going through the EFI firmware setting. I will update this post in few hours when the tool is ready for release.
As promised, I have upload the tool to fix the EFI BootLoader to https://sourceforge.net/projects/veracrypt/files/Contributions/VcFixBoot.zip/download (its PGP signature is at https://sourceforge.net/projects/veracrypt/files/Contributions/VcFixBoot.zip.sig/download).
The zip file contains both 32bit and 64bit binaries and they are both signed using the same certificates as VeraCrypt.
Let me know if it works as expected.
Thanks. I ran the tool and restarted. The PC appeared to start normally and went straight to the Veracrypt password entry then booted into Windows, but failed to mount the non-system Veracrypt volumes that should auto-mount on boot as System Favorites. When I tried to mount them, after a while of the normal mounting wait box, the system froze and I had to do a hard reboot. The second boot process was very odd, and no password prompt appeared, but I entered my password on a blank black screen and that appeared to work, though booting was very slow. There was a Veracrypt error message on rebooting that Veracrypt volumes failed to mount. I will try again, but it is late here so I must leave it until tomorrow.
The restart was normal, with no system favorite mounting problems. So far so good.
Will the tool's effect survive Windows updates, and is it necessary to reverse the tool's changes if ever the system drive is decrypted?
Glad to see that the tool worked as expected.
In the upcoming 1.24 release, the mechanism implemented by this tool
will be applied automatically so that Windows updates will not break the
VeraCrypt BootLoader. Until then, this tool must be applied manually
each time such issue appear.
There is nothing special to do if the system drive is decrypted: this
tool only put the machine boot configuration in the correct state and if
the system is decrypted, the process will go as usual.