32 replies to this topic

[securitybreach]

raymac46, on 03 October 2018 - 10:33 AM, said:

I have a 2012 era HP notebook that used to belong to my daughter. It is a legacy BIOS machine that ran Windows 7 originally and I had no trouble booting an MX Live USB stick and installing MX-17 on it.

Well if the drive was partitioned using mbr/bios, then it would work fine. On the other hand, if the drive was parititoned with GPT, you couldn't read it on a legacy bios machine.

[sunrat]

saturnian, on 02 October 2018 - 07:48 PM, said:

I'm kinda getting to the point where I prefer the "parent" distros over the "derivative" distros. Like, my Stretch Xfce installation compared to MX, or my Arch installations compared to Antergos and ArchLabs -- when I go with the "parent" I end up with a cleaner system, not as many added "tools" and stuff that I don't want or need. Takes more work, though.

Agree with you there. MX is slowly turning into a beginners distro with lots of tools that do very little, and mostly functions I already do with one line in CLI. It's still a great distro as it's incredibly reliable and has some nice backported programs to keep it more current than Debian, and great theming. siduction is still my main distro but endless upgrades get a bit tiring too. I have one Stretch install (with NeptuneOS' Plasma 5.12) which is tempting to use but as siduction's Plasma 5.13 is miles better than Stretch's 5.8, I think it may be after Buster get's released when I finally return home to mother.

[saturnian]

securitybreach, on 03 October 2018 - 06:48 AM, said:

Yeah, that does sound odd.

Yes, this seems strange. I don't think I want to spend much time worrying about this (my apologies for not starting a new thread), but I don't understand what's going on here. Went back this afternoon and tested one of these notebooks with some different flash drives.

This notebook is currently home to Debian Stretch, with GNOME, and it's the computer I use at home for business and important stuff. I am not wanting to replace Stretch with MX-17.

I used dd to write to each flash drive. All of these boot fine on the older, non-UEFI notebooks. The isos used were:

MX-17.1_August_X64.iso
gparted_live-0.32.0-1-amd64.iso
devuan_ascii_2.0.0_amd64_desktop-live.iso
debian-live_9.5.0_amd64-xfce.iso
bl-Helum_amd64+build2.iso
Kubuntu 18.04.1 (forgot to write down the iso name)

Pardon me if I've made any typos there. The first two won't boot (I get taken right to the Stretch boot screen), the others boot fine. In fact, I don't recall having any problem booting this machine with any other distros besides MX and GParted Live. I don't think I should have to do something different in the BIOS setup for only those two distros. I tested these because they're all more or less related to Debian.

Also, when I'm logged into Debian Stretch on that machine, the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives don't automount (in GNOME), but the others do.

[securitybreach]

Well that may the issue... you cannot use both UEFI and Legacy on the same machine. In my experience, it doesn't matter if your biois allows you to set it as hybrid (uefi and/or legacy), you can do only have it set as one or the other. So if your bios is set to use legacy and mbr, you cannot run uefi and gpt partitions on the same machine.

Hybrid is supposed to allow you to use either or, but I have had not had very much luck with that. It's best to choose one or the other.

[saturnian]

securitybreach, on 07 October 2018 - 08:10 PM, said:

Well that may the issue... you cannot use both UEFI and Legacy on the same machine. In my experience, it doesn't matter if your biois allows you to set it as hybrid (uefi and/or legacy), you can do only have it set as one or the other. So if your bios is set to use legacy and mbr, you cannot run uefi and gpt partitions on the same machine.

Hybrid is supposed to allow you to use either or, but I have had not had very much luck with that. It's best to choose one or the other.

I don't get it. Why would I have a problem with only the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives, then?

[securitybreach]

saturnian, on 08 October 2018 - 09:30 AM, said:

securitybreach, on 07 October 2018 - 08:10 PM, said:

Well that may the issue... you cannot use both UEFI and Legacy on the same machine. In my experience, it doesn't matter if your biois allows you to set it as hybrid (uefi and/or legacy), you can do only have it set as one or the other. So if your bios is set to use legacy and mbr, you cannot run uefi and gpt partitions on the same machine.

Hybrid is supposed to allow you to use either or, but I have had not had very much luck with that. It's best to choose one or the other.

I don't get it. Why would I have a problem with only the MX-17 and GParted Live flash drives, then?

Is the partition table GPT or MBR?

[saturnian]

GPT. Okay, this is starting to bug me, so I'm starting a new thread.

[securitybreach]

saturnian, on 08 October 2018 - 11:41 AM, said:

GPT. Okay, this is starting to bug me, so I'm starting a new thread.

GPT can only boot in uefi mode.