Disabling the FUJITSU logo fixed USB boot freezes on my ESPRIMO G5010/E
Contents
Work needed a local server, and nobody felt like spending real money on it.
So I went digging through used PCs in Akihabara and ended up deciding to put Ubuntu on a Fujitsu ESPRIMO G5010/E compact PC.
Probably a decent deal.
Last time I installed a distribution I barely knew and things got confusing,
so this time, a plain recent Ubuntu.
Burned the ISO to a USB stick and rebooted.
It didn’t boot.
Just the FUJITSU logo on screen, not even a hint of loading.
I came close to karate-chopping the case, but after about six hours of thinking I managed to get it installed.
It irritated me enough that I’m writing it down here.
Environment
The ESPRIMO G5010/E is a business compact PC announced in October 2020, 10th-gen Intel Core generation, Intel H410 chipset (Fujitsu press release).
Storage is the built-in Samsung 256GB SSD; the preinstalled Windows gets wiped for a clean Ubuntu install.
All it has to run is development Docker containers plus Tailscale, so I skipped every custom option and took the installer defaults.
The problem
With the Ubuntu installer USB plugged in, the machine powers on and stops at the FUJITSU logo screen.
F12, which should bring up the boot menu, isn’t accepted either.
Unplug the USB stick and it boots normally, so it doesn’t look like broken hardware.
The plausible causes are,
- Boot order
- A corrupted ISO image
- The way the ISO was written to the USB stick
- A flaky USB port
- A broken UEFI (the firmware that manages PC startup).
That’s a fair list, but normally the answer turns up around number 1 or 2. I think.
When I actually tested it, the machine booted fine with an empty USB stick plugged in.
Meanwhile the boot USBs for Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Desktop, and Proxmox VE all stopped at the FUJITSU logo.
So much for 1 through 4. At this point it starts to feel like the hardware itself.
The workaround
Wondering what the most minimal boot load would do, I put a UEFI Shell (a command-line shell that runs on UEFI) on a FAT32 USB stick as EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI. No good either.
In fact nothing moves past the FUJITSU logo at all.
Going only by what I’d seen so far,
- The machine boots even with a USB stick plugged in, as long as it’s empty
- If the USB stick has something bootable on it, it freezes(?)
- In state 2, mashing F2 or F12 before the boot logo appears does nothing, and the logo comes up anyway
Apparently, then, the UEFI is falling over right around where it recognizes bootable USB devices.
Figuring it might be the boot options after all, I opened the BIOS one more time.
This machine’s BIOS setup is fairly unusual, maybe because it’s a business model, and there isn’t much you can configure.
The genuinely odd part: the Boot menu in setup has an item that toggles the logo display on and off.
In the official BIOS setup menu list for the G5010/E (B6FH-B932-01), the item is the boot-time logo display, and the default is enabled.
I switched it to disabled, and suddenly a loading indicator appeared under the logo.
In other words, it’s now simply booting.
With the USB stick plugged in it no longer stops, and both the F12 boot menu and the F2 BIOS open fine.
When I plugged the earlier USB stick back in to check, the first boot brought up the Windows 11 logo instead. That’s because in this BIOS, newly added UEFI boot devices default to the bottom of the priority list (changeable). In other words, I forgot to change it.
On reboot I mashed F12, the USB’s UEFI entry appeared in the boot menu, and the Shell came up cleanly.
After that I rebuilt the Ubuntu install USB, picked the USB from F12, and the Ubuntu installer booted as well.
Just in case, I’ve left the logo set to disabled.
A logo display setting that should have nothing to do with anything makes USB boot work correctly, but whether the logo is really the cause, I can’t say.
And since I don’t know whether this happens on G5010/E units in general or just on my unit and BIOS version, I figured I’d at least check the BIOS update history.
D3804 BIOS update history
The mainboard in the G5010 series is the D3804, and BIOS packages ship per D3804-A1x (Fujitsu’s BIOS download page lists ESPRIMO G5010 in the covered products).
In that update history, the combination of the logo and hangs shows up more than once.
| Version | Date | Original fix note |
|---|---|---|
| R1.26.0 | December 16, 2020 | Fix: System hang and Fujitsu Logo missing with Japan settings |
| R1.39.0 | May 27, 2021 | Fix: Ubuntu Bootloader implemented |
| R1.40.0 | May 30, 2022 | Fix: System sporadically froze in Fujitsu Logo after flashing |
R1.26.0 fixed a system hang with the FUJITSU logo missing under Japan settings; R1.40.0 fixed sporadic freezes at the FUJITSU logo after flashing the BIOS.
Both are subtly different from this case, where the machine stops at the logo with USB media inserted and disabling the logo display works around it.
My unit’s BIOS is R1.47, newer than the R1.40 that carried those fixes. The problem happened anyway.
Still, one thing the distribution history does show is that this PC keeps receiving the same kind of update again and again.
Incidentally, the Ubuntu bootloader support was itself added later, in R1.39.0 in May 2021.