HP Z440 'No room left on device' NVRAM issue when installing Linux bootloader

[PrivatePixels]

Dear All,

I'm running into an issue when trying to install Linux on my Z440, where 'grub-install' bails with a 'No room on device' error message.

Of course there's plenty room on the 512Mb EPS partition, i checked it a good few times. So I assume that the NVRAM storage for EFI variables is full. Thus, I tried removing several of the entries using the 'efibootmgr' command and the removal does get rid of a couple of EFI variable entries. However, the 'No Room on Device' error persists and my attempts at installing any of the many linux distributions I've tried, results in the same 'No space left on device' bootloader installation error.

Re-installing Windows 10 works just fine. It's a little confusing.

I thought that downgrading the M60 BIOS from 2.62 to 2.61 might help 'clear' the NVRAM variable storage, but that didn't work and now of course I cannot find version 2.62 on HP's support website anymore, only 2.61.

Anyways, suggestions in how to get back on track with installing GRUB so I can boot Linux on my Z440 would be great.

PS. In the past I've installed and run various flavours of Linux on this very machine without any difficulties at all.

[PrivatePixels]

To answer my own question, I found that older distributions of GNU/Linux (I tested Artix and Alpine) install the bootloader and then boot just fine. So, it seems to me that the issue is caused by newer versions of GRUB not playing nicely with the EFI implementation on the Z440 motherboard.

Life's too short to figure out more about this issue, and I'll just run with an older distro.