Failure to start system from EFI shell

Question

While attempting to install Mint 21.2/Manjaro 23.0.1 on Irbis TW60 (system specs) I was dropped into an EFI shell. Booting from it is not possible, as outlined below.

What is known:

• Secure Boot is off;
• EFI Shell is at version 2.1;
• Installer USB is on FS0;
• EFI file is located at FS0:\efi\boot\grubx64.efi.

What is supposed to happen: Upon execution of any .efi file I should be thrown either into GRUB or memory check.

What actually happens: Nothing.

EFI shell output:

Shell> FS0:
FS0:> cd efi\boot
FS0:\efi\boot> dir
Directory of: FS0:\efi\boot\
04/15/2022 22:08 <DIR>      2.048 .
04/15/2022 22:08 <DIR>          0 ..
04/15/2022 22:08         $size_x  mmx64.efi
04/15/2022 22:08         $size_y  grubx64.efi
04/15/2022 22:08         $size_z  bootx64.efi
    3 File(s) $total_size bytes
    2 Dir(s)
FS0:\efi\boot> grubx64.efi
FS0:\efi\boot>

Answer 1

After testing various other distros I was able to launch a Debian ISO, and the installer on it. It failed at the "Installing the system" stage, installing manually via debootstrap however went well.

After chrooting I installed the grub-efi-ia32 package and installed grub as follows:

grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi --bootloader-id=$NAME --target=i386-efi
update-grub

The device now works properly.

Lessons learned:

• Not every 64-bit system uses a 64 bit bootloader.