M72e LibreELEC Installation and MBR work around ERROR 1962: No Operating System Found
Hi all, first time poster long time reader/user. I do not profess to be an expert. In fact, I'm just a tinkerer when it comes to tech, but I have my successes and have found a working solution to the ERROR 1962: No operating system found issue.
Because I am a lay person, I have spent the past 2 weeks trying various fixes that have not worked (on their own) but an amalgamation of 2 fixes from the Lenovo forums and LibreELEC forum has worked.
First, I used the LibreELEC USB/SD creator with the selection of Intel and the generic image LibreELEC-Generic.x86_64-11.0.1.img loaded onto a USB pen drive.
I then booted from the USB (which was changed in the BIOS boot sequence. I pressed F1 to enter the BIOS on this system then changed the sequence) whilst in there I also disabled the secure boot as I had read there was an issue with this when booting into LibreELEC.
The installer came up for LibreELEC and I installed it as directed. This is amazingly simple, and no instructions are really required.
I then removed the USB as directed and selected reboot.
The system rebooted and I got the ERROR 1962: No Operating System Found 🙁 (2 weeks of sheer frustration then ensued)
WARNING: This fix involves modifying the system's EFI/MBR boot instructions and can result in a broken system if not done properly or because you have a different setup. Please be advised that I take no responsibility for the breakage of your system. Please use it at your own RISK!
So the fix. I loaded the USB again and typed in live. This boots temporarily into LibreELEC from the USB.
I then made sure that the option that comes up to enable SSH was checked (I used the default hostname and password for ease) Hostname: root Password: Libreelec
Then after connecting my Wi-Fi network, I went to Settings/Addons/Install from repository/LibreELEC/Program addons/System tools/Install.
Then on my Windows laptop I opened the command line prompt. in the search box I typed cmd---then right clicked the icon and chose---run as administrator.
I then typed ssh [email protected]. Then it asked for the password which was: Libreelec
The connection was established and now I had access to the Librelec system.
Next I typed:
efibootmgr –v. This brings up the boot record and their respective boot number sequence. I was looking for the “Windows Boot Manager” line and there wasn’t any.
So I created one (instructions below). The reason being is the system is looking for it and for some reason it does not see the boot record for LibreELEC.
The reason I have said it's an amalgamation is that I found the LibreELEC forum fix not to have worked but it had the right information in terms of the record that needs to be written to and the Lenovo forum had the correct way of writing to the record but not the correct system (it was a different version of Linux also).
PLEASE NOTE: If the Windows Boot Manager is already in the list then you cannot continue with these commands.
TYPE:
efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l '\EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi' -L "Windows Boot Manager" Once complete TYPE:
efibootmgr –v Check the order of the boot numbers. If they are out of sequence put them in the correct order by replacing the below with the numbers shown on your system
TYPE:
efibootmgr –o 000X,00XX,00XX
EXAMPLE: Mine was - efibootmgr –o 0000,0005,0006,0008,0009 I then shut down the pc REMOVED the USB and booted it back up.
It booted straight into LibreELEC as this was what I wanted it to do.
I rebooted a number of times to make sure there weren’t any issues and installed a few addons to make sure they stayed on the system after booting. May seem like an odd thing to do but I have been trying for so long I don’t think I could quite believe it worked. 😀
I have written the instructions in this way to help those who aren't completely familiar with how to do various aspects of this fix.
System Specs:
Lenovo M72e Tiny
8gb Ram