On Mon, 22 May 2023 at 21:48, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Mon, May 22, 2023 at 08:34:34AM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
I've recently acquired (through a friend who stopped using it) a Toshiba Satellite L500 - Core i3 (3rd gen?), 4G RAM. I'm determined to get Linux onto it (preferably Debian). I thought I had succeeded: I booted from a Debian USB stick, installed to the HD. All appeared to go well, but the system won't boot. It returns to the Boot Menu and says "HDXXXX has failed." What the search engines are telling me is that with this generation of Toshibas, the problem is generally Secure Boot / CSM etc. Which makes sense, but ... there is absolutely zero mention in the BIOS/UEFI ("Phoenix SecureCore Tiano Setup") of "Secure Boot," "CSM," "Legacy," or "UEFI." Acccording to notes I found online, "SecureCore Tiano" has "full support" for legacy booting.
Another issue with this machine is my mixed success booting from USB sticks: I have an old-ish USB stick I built myself that has GRUB and a large menu of ISOs: works great on most systems, won't boot on this thing - probably because it's an old-style BIOS-boot only(?).
One of my ideas was to upgrade the BIOS: it appears there's a newer version available, but it's NOT available from Toshiba, which is the only place I'd want to download it from. The rest look like dubious secondary download sites (if you know one you consider reliable, let me know).
What I read online said that Fedora's installer puts an EFI partition on the HD as part of the install, while Debian doesn't. And that may(?) be why I can't boot from my Debian install? So ... I downloaded the Fedora installer, put it on a USB stick ... and no joy: the Toshiba doesn't recognize the Fedora USB stick as a bootable item. Would this be because I burned it on a "Legacy" system? Is there a fix for that? Except ... I'm about 99% sure the Debian Installer USB stick was created on the same machine.
Worst case, I can stick the HD from the Toshiba into another machine, install Fedora on it, repartition to make room for Debian, put the HD back into the Toshiba ... but that's getting damn complicated and annoying.
As always - any suggestions welcomed.
Debian can definitely be installed in EFI mode, but you must boot the installer in EFI mode to do it, not legacy mode. Usually on UEFI systems the boot meny gives you a choice of booting in legacy or UEFI mode.
Of course if the system is set to legacy mode instead and you install in UEFI mode, then when it goes to boot later you will get a boot error (I think something like BBS HD error (BBS being Bios Boot Specification apparently)).
It does appear those machines are a disaster and hence the unofficial BIOS versions out there trying to fix the complete disaster toshiba sold.
The problem is solved. I think it's worth reporting here in the manner of Hugh's "War Stories" because it was so weird. Although it's probably an edge case that others are unlikely to encounter. As far as I can determine, this system will only boot from a USB stick if the USB stick is willing to boot in "Legacy" mode - and even then maybe only if that stick has an EFI folder. I'm not kidding: it wouldn't boot from a Fedora 38 installer stick, it wouldn't boot from my old multiboot stick (pure legacy, mostly used for Knoppix), and it would only boot from the Debian 11 installer stick if the BIOS was set for "Legacy" even though the Debian stick should work fine in either EFI or Legacy mode. But because the Debian installer booted in Legacy mode, my initial install (see above) wouldn't boot because it installed Legacy ... and this is an EFI-only system (sort of). Yesterday I booted from the Debian 11 installer and used the "Advanced" install (which I hate - so very many steps, with the added bonus of multiple opportunities for foot-gun). I strayed from the beaten path three times: once to say "yes, I'd like 'https://' in /etc/apt/sources.list", once to create an encrypted VG, and the final time - the reason I used "Advanced" - to say "force EFI install." That option didn't show up at the point I expected it to. I thought it would be with the HD formatting steps, but instead it comes much later, around the GRUB installation. (In hindsight this makes sense, but it wasn't what I expected.) The install process then failed on further package installation - I think I know why, we'll get to that. But everything else went okay, and I had a bootable (if minimal and text-only) Debian system. What I immediately discovered was that I couldn't 'apt update' because the certificates on the remotes listed in /etc/apt/sources.list weren't "recognized." I removed the "s" in "https://" throughout sources.list and everything's been fine since. I assume this is why package installation during the install process was busted. That's right: I had to boot in Legacy mode because it was the only way this UEFI-only system would boot from a USB stick, and then force it to install EFI even though it had booted in Legacy mode. So ... the UEFI setup dictates that external media MUST be legacy, and the internal HD MUST be EFI? Well that's horrible and confusing. And for all my trouble I now have a third gen Core i3 system with 4G of RAM ... but I have to admit to myself (and tell you, to help you understand why I did this) that I just like solving puzzles - particularly Linux-based ones. -- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com