RHEL 7.3 does not support UEFI?

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I have a Dell T3420 with Windows 10 Pro on one hard drive. I added a second hard drive to the Dell, one that I had bought from Open World Computing. The hard-drive is recognized by Dell Support Assistant and Windows 10.

My goal is to install RHEL on this second hard-drive
Please see attached pic from diskmgmt.msc.

I made sure both drives are non-RAID. The one which has Windows 10 Pro is a PCIE drive. The other drive on which I want to install RHEL is AHCI. I didn't format that volume.

So I created a bootable USB with the RHEL 7.3 download from Red Hat's Developer Site. I formatted the USB using Rufus. I chose formatting with GPT and UEFI from the drop down and picked up the RHEL ISO that I had downloaded from the Red Hat developer site.

The issue that I faced was when booting from the USB, the RHEL installer won't recognize my hard drives.

On the Installation Destination page, under Device Selection, I would only see the USB drive under Local Standard Disks.

I kept the UEFI and turned off Secure Boot , but that didn't solve the problem.

Finally, I disabled UEFI and Secure Boot, and chose Legacy Boot.
That also didn't solve the problem.

Then I went back to Rufus and chose MBR for UEBI and Bios as the partition.

I played with the Bios options on my Dell. Only when I had Legacy Boot option, the RHEL installer was able to recognize both hard drives drives. I saw both of these drives on the Installation Selection page.

I chose the one which does not have Windows 10 and was able to install RHEL (after a few tweaks with the partitions etc. in the RHEL installer wizard). No problems with this step.

I have two questions:

  1. Why wasn't the RHEL installer on USB when formatted with GPT not able to see both of my internal hard drives?

  2. After installation of RHEL, is there any way I can switch the Bios to Secure Boot and be able to boot either Windows 10 OR RHEL? I am suspecting this isn't possible because when I did re-enable Secure Boot, the only boot loader option I saw upon system startup was Windows 10.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Ray

Responses

Hi D,

RHEL7 supports UEFI and GPT out of the box, so the problem with your disks had to have a different reason. Perhaps the USB disk was prepared incorrectly? See 2.2. Making Installation USB Media in the Installation Guide as well as 24.10.1. UEFI Secure Boot Support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 in the System Administrator Guide.

Converting a system from legacy boot/MBR to UEFI/GPT is possible but non-trivial. You would need to boot the system from a live distro, convert the MBR to GPT (see the gdisk tool and its f command), and create a UEFI partition (which would probably mean having to shrink your existing boot partition). A new installation would certainly be simpler.

Thanks Robert. I will take a look at the links you had sent. Per your guidance, I would also like to avoid having to move from boot MBR to UEFI GPT.

Regarding your question about the USB, I had used Rufus and selected GPT as the partition, and accepted whatever was the default block size. Then I chose the RHEL 7.3 ISO.

You know, had a question on that RHEL 7.3 ISO. I downloaded that from the Red Hat Developer's site. Could that be a reason? I mean, is the developer version not UEFI certified but the commercial product is? I will be using Linux strictly as a developer and I have no commercial intent.

Thanks for your help

I'm not familiar with the Rufus tool, so I suggest you try creating the USB disk using the recommended Fedora LiveUSB Creator -- see the Installation Guide linked above.

The RHEL ISO downloaded through the Red Hat Developer Program is exactly the same as what you would get with a subscription from the Customer Portal. Also, the installed system will be identical to 'regular' RHEL installations. The only difference is in the level of support.

Hi Robert, I created a bootable USB with Fedora MediaWriter 4.1 and RHEL 7.3. Fedora MediaWriter didn't give me any option with the partition (i.e. I didn't have to choose GPT with UEFI, or MBR, or MBR with both Bios and UEFI, which is what I saw with Rufus).

Unfortunately no luck. This time when I boot off the USB, the RHEL installer cannot detect any disk. Secure Boot and UEFI are both enabled.

If this would have some implication, when I downloaded RHEL 7.3 from the Developer site, I selected bare metal.

Any thoughts on what else could be going wrong? I will ask a very dumb question - Do the hard-drives need to be UEFI-certified? One of the hard-drives on which Windows 10 Pro is installed is a PCIe hard-drive that came with the system. I am installing Linux on a new hard-drive. Both drives, as I had mentioned earlier, are accessible to diskmgmt.msc, as shown in the picture that I had attached in my original post.

Thanks for taking the time to help!

The RHEL installer cannot recognize the disk because it is not "prepared". Download the GParted ISO file from gparted.org, burn it to a CD/DVD or write it to an USB device (you can use the Media Writer tool), boot from the media. GParted opens automatically - now create a new partition table for the disk (choose msdos when you want to install RHEL in legacy BIOS (MBR) mode, choose GPT when you want to install RHEL in EFI mode) and then create a new partition, format this new partition with ext4 and after having applied all actions, close GParted. Boot from the RHEL installation media and now the installer will recognize the disk.

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