I bought a Fujitsu Esprimo q556/s mini PC and wanted to install ZimaOS on it.
I can boot the installation USB and the installation seemingly goes smoothly.
The problem is, after the installation the BIOS doesn’t recognize any bootable drive.
I think the ZimaOS installation may fail to create a boot entry.
I tried installing on a Kingston A400 960GB SATA SSD, Micron 1100 265GB SATA SSD and a Toshiba 750GB HDD. All drives work fine if I install Windows or a Debian distro on them, but won’t boot with ZimaOS.
I updated the BIOS to the newest (2024) version, it’s UEFI with Legacy off, Secure Boot is off and, although I can’t find an AHCI setting, I suspect it’s probably the standard setting so unlikely to be the culprit.
Here are the specs of the PC:
Intel Core i5-7500T
Intel HD Graphics 630
16GB DDR4 RAM
I tried booting the SSD with ZimaOS on it as an external drive on my Thinkpad T495.
It recognizes the drive and I can boot it.
Seems like it is something with the Esprimo’s BIOS after all, but I can’t see any relevant settings that could cause something like this.
I think it might be something similar to what this post on GitHub is talking about, but I’m not tech savvy ebough to use their solution: Boot entry not added after install (won’t boot after install) · Issue #61 · IceWhaleTech/ZimaOS
It sounds like your installation of ZimaOS actually finished correctly, but the system didn’t create or register a proper EFI boot entry in the BIOS. This isn’t a problem with your drive, it’s a quirk that can happen on some systems (especially certain Fujitsu models) where the BIOS doesn’t automatically detect the ZimaOS bootloader even though it’s been installed.
Here’s what’s likely going on: During installation, ZimaOS sets up the EFI boot files on the small “boot partition” of your SSD. Most BIOS versions automatically add an entry pointing to those files so the system knows where to start from. However, a few BIOS firmwares, including some from Fujitsu, don’t do this automatically. As a result, the installation completes successfully, but there’s simply no boot entry registered in the firmware, so it looks like there’s no bootable system.
To fix this, you can boot again using your ZimaOS USB installer and open the live or recovery environment. From there, you would mount the installed system, access it from inside (similar to entering maintenance mode), and reinstall the GRUB bootloader manually. This process forces the BIOS to recognize ZimaOS by creating a proper UEFI boot entry. Once that’s done, the BIOS will list “ZimaOS” as a bootable option, and it should start normally.
If the BIOS still doesn’t list it, there’s also a manual method to add the entry directly inside the firmware using a small utility that tells it, “Hey, this is where the operating system’s bootloader lives.” After adding that entry once, it will remain there permanently and work like any other OS.
So, in short, your installation isn’t broken, it’s just missing a BIOS registration step. Once the boot entry is recreated, ZimaOS should boot perfectly fine on your Esprimo.