Unable to access bios and other distros after install

Ask Fedora
1

After installing Fedora, upon reboot, grub does not show the two other distros that were (and still are) on the system, and boots directly into Fedora. Have tried to reinstall to delete and reinstall grub, but won’t allow deletion. Will update, but upon reboot still boots directly into Fedora.

At the same time I cannot get into the bios. System will no longer display Logo screen and goes directly to Fedora. The system is Lenovo Thinkcentre. I have been to Lenovo’s site and many other sites looking for clues. They all say the same thing. F1, F2, Function F1, etc. I have tried many many times in many ways to get to bios. Holding keys down on boot, tapping keys on boot, etc. Nothing works.

I can’t boot from usb, nor cd/dvd, etc.

Also, the system is set up with an external drive controller so I can select the drives…
#1,2,3,4, or one, or all, etc. I have tried no drives and still won’t go into bios.

I have not pulled down the system and pulled the battery…last resort I suppose.

When the system starts, the screen does flash the logo for a moment, but it is so fast that if you didn’t know what it was, you would not see it. It’s like a blip.

Is there a way to access the bios, or slow the boot down, or something to either access bios, or grub. I don’t understand how the install would cause this.

Thank you for any help. Really frustrated.

2

Did you try using
systemctl reboot --firmware-setup?

3

It kinda sounds like you have fast boot set in the bios.I set that once and the only way I could get in the bios and disable it was pull the battery on the motherboard.Maybe someone else has a better solution.

4

Thank you. That is the only thing I have come up with as a solution.
What I don’t understand is that I had set bios not to fast boot before installing Mint and Ubuntu, for obvious reasons. Everything was fine until I installed Fedora. I never messed with the bios before installing Fedora. Is there something I missed in the install? I don’t want it to happen again.

5

Is there a chance that you updated the bios on the system? Updating the bios usually causes a reset to default of all settings within the bios and systems that expect to have windows loaded often are preset to fast boot. IME fast boot not only prevents the user from accessing bios but also prevents accessing the grub menu. I had one system that I inadvertently enabled fast boot and was forced to open the case and use the bios jumper on the mobo to drain the flash and reset the defaults before I could access it again.

The command above with the --firmware-setup option should however allow bios to be accessed on that reboot.