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mx-17, uefi/secure boot, and my hp15 notebook


saturnian

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This is just a follow-up on what I mentioned in another thread...

 

Well, I'm taking one last look at trying to boot the MX-17 flash drive on my new HP 15 notebook, comparing things to the older HP 15, and trying to figure out why the new one won't boot the MX-17 flash drive but the old one will.

 

On both notebooks, Secure Boot and Legacy Support are both disabled, and the boot order is set as I noted earlier in this thread: http://forums.scotsn...showtopic=95707

 

That boot order is:

 

Internal CD/DVD ROM Drive

USB Diskette on Key/USB Hard Disk

OS boot Manager

USB CD/DVD ROM Drive

! Network Adapter

 

I tried enabling Secure Boot, but the MX-17 flash drive wouldn't boot with that enabled, so I went back and disabled it.

 

I have tested 8 different distros on the new HP 15 notebook. All of them boot into the respective distro's live session, except for MX-17. The seven that did work:

 

- BunsenLabs Deuterium (bl-Deuterium-i386_20170429.iso)

- Grml64--full_2017.05.iso

- KNOPPIX 7.7.1 (created with flash-knoppix from a live session running from DVD)

- kubuntu-17.10.1-desktop-amd64.iso

- debian-live-9.0.1-amd64-gnome.iso

- gparted-live-0.29.0-1-amd64.iso

- SalentOS-Neriton-2.0-amd64.iso

 

The MX-17 flash drive boots fine on the older HP 15 notebook -- no problems there. For the new notebook, I used GParted Live for the partitioning, and I used Debian Live for the installation.

 

I followed the same steps for the new notebook that I used on the old one: I deleted all the partitions (wiping out Windows), and repartitioned. sda1 is a 512 MB fat32 partition; there's a swap partition, and the other partitions are ext4. I looked at GParted on both computers to see if there was any difference in the EFI partition, but I can't see any differences.

 

On the new notebook, df -hT shows sda1 as follows:

 

/dev/sda1 vfat 511M 132K 511M 1% /boot/efi

 

These are the only two UEFI/Secure Boot computers that I own, so I don't have much experience with this stuff.

 

I have not yet brought this issue up at the MX Linux forums, but I'm following a thread there where some related issues are mentioned: https://forum.mxlinu...p?f=104&t=43895

 

I might chime in on that thread at some point, but for right now I'm just gonna follow the thread and see what happens. Other than that, I'm about ready to give up on this issue, although curiosity might get the better of me in the end! Again, this is not a critical issue as I am not trying to install MX-17 on the new HP 15 notebook, but it does kinda bug me that the same flash drive works on all of my other computers, and the same flash drive is the only one I have that doesn't boot up the new notebook.

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Did you try burning MX-17 onto a DVD and seeing if it will boot from your optical drive? It has to be some sort of GRUB/EFI glitch on the flash drive that is unique to the new machine. MX-17 does not use systemd but I doubt you are getting that far.

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I wrote MX-17 to a stick that I formatted on a Windows 7 pc and used RUFUS to do the write. It works perfectly on a MBR pc and a UEFI pc. I just formated the whole stick as Fat 32 and the MX-17.iso took care of creating the needed partitions by itself.

 

That is all I can contribute as I have not tried dd to a stick from within a linux set up for MX-17.

 

:breakfast:

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Just a thought. It isn't some sort of weird USB 3/USB 2 port incompatibility is it? If you have a USB 2 port on your new machine try the stick there and see if that works.

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Just a thought. It isn't some sort of weird USB 3/USB 2 port incompatibility is it? If you have a USB 2 port on your new machine try the stick there and see if that works.

 

Well worth a try as usb stuff can be pretty strange.

 

Here I digress and go of at a slight tangent so I will apologise for the hijack temporarily of this thread.

 

Small things make big differences .................

 

I have my super dooper Skylake build set up with a dual boot. I have a Logitech usb keyboard.

 

Trying to use the "Del or F12" keys to get into SetUp or a Boot menu has been very hit and miss. The pc often boots straight into Windows no matter how quickly I hit the mentioned keys. This means that I have to shutdown and try to boot again over and over again if I want to use my Arch install. As you can imagine this has rather upset my normal chilled out equilibrium.

Yesterday I found an old purple PS/2 to usb adapter and I noticed that my mobo had a single purple PS/2 socket, there is no green PS/2 socket.

Hmm I thought , I wonder if I plug my Logitech keyboard into the PS/2 connector and plug that into the mobo , will it make a difference to my dual boot problem.

An do you know it did.

Hit the power switch, hit "Del or F12" a couple of times and, like magic I get into the Bios or a Boot Menu. Every single time not just now and again but every single time.

Ain't life strange.

 

rolleyes.gif

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I have seen that too in older machines where the USB keyboard wouldn't function during the boot process. Usually a PS/2 connection will work if you have it.

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Did you try burning MX-17 onto a DVD and seeing if it will boot from your optical drive?

 

I haven't tried this, but I'd certainly do so if I was attempting an installation.

 

Just a thought. It isn't some sort of weird USB 3/USB 2 port incompatibility is it? If you have a USB 2 port on your new machine try the stick there and see if that works.

 

Yeah, it has one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports. I tried them all, same result.

 

I've kinda given up on this for now. I'll just use another distro's live session for that computer, if I ever need to.

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