PluginFlag:esp not found

Background

At startup fwupd checks to see if the ESP partition can be found using UDisks. The UEFI plugin requires write access to the ESP (although the ESP doesn't have to be mounted at startup) and the ESP is not available it will fail to start up and a message is shown with a link to this page.

The WARNING: UEFI ESP partition not detected or configured will show if there was no ESP configured.

Causes

This error is commonly caused by the following scenarios:

• UDisks is not installed
• The UDisks service has not been started
• EFI system partition is not detected by UDisks
• EFI system partition is not mounted
• EFI system partition is not mounted read-write
• EFI system partition is not mounted in recognized common paths (/boot, /boot/efi, or /esp)
• EFI system partition is formatted an unrecognized filesystem
• EFI system partition is corrupt
• EFI system partition is a member of a RAID array
• EFI system partition on a GUID partition table with a wrong partition type GUID #6024

To debug, you can use sudo /usr/bin/fwupdtool esp-list --verbose and most commonly you'll see a warning about GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.UDisks2 was not provided by any .service files - in this case you can install UDisks and restart your computer.

If you can't solve the problem by installing UDisks you should manually set EspLocation in the [fwupd] section of /etc/fwupd/fwupd.conf (on Debian it's /etc/fwupd/daemon.conf).

Restart the daemon after making this change:

For regular installation:

# systemctl restart fwupd.service

For a snap installation:

# systemctl restart snap.fwupd.fwupd.service

NOTE: If not using udisks then fwupd will be unable to mount and unmount the ESP as required. In this case the ESP should be mounted at startup, before fwupd is loaded and then remain mounted.