UEFI VM Boot Failure and Inaccessible BIOS on AHV | Nutanix Community
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UEFI VM Boot Failure and Inaccessible BIOS on AHV


Issue: I can’t get UEFI to work with VMs at all.

CE version of AHV  on Dell 4 year old hardware - AHV and CVM operational and appear fine.

VMs appear to be OK as long as it’s using legacy bios. I can’t get UEFI to boot, black screen of X/f2.

I was going to attempt a workaround: Install using legacy and convert to UEFI but I can’t get into the VM bios?  Tried F2, DEL, F12 … every F out there and it goes straight to windows.

Does anyone have a recommendation? I can take screenshots if that helps

 

Best answer by JeroenTielen

What do you want to do in the bios of the vm?? If you want to convert a legacy vm to uefi you need to use:  acli vm.update <VM_NAME> uefi_boot=true

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JeroenTielen
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What do you want to do in the bios of the vm?? If you want to convert a legacy vm to uefi you need to use:  acli vm.update <VM_NAME> uefi_boot=true


  • Adventurer
  • March 2, 2025

Hi, thanks for your reply. I’m using the instructions I found here:

  • Conversion tool:

    The primary tool used for this conversion is "MBR2GPT" which is included in Windows. 

  • BIOS settings change:

    After converting the disk to GPT, you need to access your BIOS settings and change the boot mode from Legacy BIOS to UEFI. 

If you’re saying that “ acli vm.update <VM_NAME> uefi_boot=true” will essentially change the BIOS setting of the VM without having to access the BIOS, I’ll try it.


  • Adventurer
  • March 2, 2025

Result of  acli vm.update <VM_NAME> uefi_boot=true

 

 


JeroenTielen
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Some CE installs give problems with UEFI based virtual machines. To get them working you need to add cpu passthrough via: acli vm.update  <VM_NAME> cpu_passthrough=true

 

If that doesn't work either then you can only boot the bios version of the machines unfortunately. (This is only for CE installations, commercial version will always work)


  • Adventurer
  • March 2, 2025

That didn’t work either. It’s still a great opportunity to learn about Nutanix and so far I’m very impressed. Thanks for your help with this.