Ranting about ASUS S56CA Windows 10 UEFI Ubuntu $&*%# ! Argh! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 12:57:33 am
content: Hi folks,I just wanted to vent some frustration after having spent the day trying to recover my Ubuntu machine on an ASUS laptop (S56CA). The issue is not Windows, it's not Ubuntu, in my mind it is ASUS or perhaps general computer manufacturers or BIOS makers that made it extremely difficult to boot a machine up with something other than Windows.First, what happened was I got the computer about 2 years ago originally with WIn10 on it. I managed after some difficulty to remove the "Secure Boot" settings from the BIOS as it was not easy. Anyways, I managed to remove it and install Ubuntu no problem at the time and was operating on Ubuntu for several years even going through a few upgrades.So I was doing some hard drive management, noticed a few errors copying some files so I wanted to boot Ubuntu from USB so that the main drive /dev/sda was not mounted, so I can run some scans. Everything checked out ok. Lo-and-behold when I went to reboot the machine, it would no longer recognize my HDD as being bootable. Nothing, nada. The BIOS would let me boot from everything else but the internal HDD. I even had 3 partitions on it, the first of which was my EFI (containing all the boot stuff), the 2nd partition being my main Ubuntu partition, and 3rd partition was "swap".I tried everything, for hours, reconfiguring my grub, using a boot-manager fixer for Ubuntu, tried to reinstall Ubuntu again but leaving the existing one there (to fix the install)<went through pages and pages of help files. I even updated the BIOS to a newer version. NO matter WHAT, it did not detect the HDD to allow me to boot Ubuntu from it (as I had previously done). I even tried a fresh install of Ubuntu to the drive and no luck. Whatever "magic" was there on the drive before was gone..... Turns out, that "magic" was put there by Windows.... The Windows Boot Manager!So my only solution was to reinstall Windows 10 on the machine (bare bones install from a USB key) and it booted no problem at all. Turned off all the secure boot crap again and then was able to then boot up an Ubuntu USB key and allow it to install itself to the drive, over-writing EVERYTHING yet again. However, Ubuntu must "chain" itself on to whatever is there to allow the grub menu to come up. Otherwise, a FRESH Ubuntu install will not do the job. We need Windows in there first.So I ask myself WHY is it like this? This machine was obviously designed to run Windows and really not much else was considered. But the BIOS has almost no options other than Windows. It has the worst UEFI manager ever, doesn't allow any customizations, doesn't let me pick partitions to boot, doesn't detect anything, it is a horrible BIOS on this ASUS machine.I'm just completing the Ubuntu install from the USB key that I booted from (UEFI booted) as I finish up this post. The main HDD has Windows on it booting from Windows Boot Manager no problem. I asked Ubuntu to completely wipe out the HDD and install itself, as I did 2 years ago when I first set it up. I am thinking it will leave whatever "magic" WBM put there and just chain iitself on there with grub, allowing me to then boot Ubuntu again as I did before. I'll post again in a few minutes if it worked. What a mess.... I hope new laptops aren't as bad.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 12:53:24 pm
content: As predicted, the windows install put back the WBR after which I immediately installed Ubuntu and now the BIOS properly finds the EFI partition and boots.Was this some kind of collusion between Microsoft and ASUS? Why couldn't another OS properly bootstrap in the system? Was the spec or some special code kept secret, or was this all meant to secure the boot to avoid malware exploits?

author: jeremy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 01:01:22 pm
content: I’m sorry that you wasted your time, but I think this reads as a classic case of Hanlon’s Razor on behalf of asus

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 01:23:04 pm
content: I am far from an expert, but I thought that secure boot was just an on/off setting in UEFI. I would also think that if it didn't like something about the drive that there would be a warning of some kind, not just ignoring it without notice. Maybe it's just a stupid BIOS design by Asus.I only have one computer with UEFI. I frequently change drives, hardware, and OS in that machine and I've had numerous problems with it over the years.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 04:53:30 pm
content: That's not really Secure Boot, IMO. If the secure boot was the culprit, it would refuse to boot the EFI executable that doesn't have the proper signature, not refuse to recognize the disk as bootable.It is either that the partition wasn't setup properly by Ubuntu as there are some "magic strings" that need to be written in the right places for a disk to be UEFI bootable or the Asus BIOS is just dumb and not properly supporting UEFI (or rather anything else butWindowson UEFI because they didn't bother to implement the standard fully/correctly).This is just a common stupidity by (mostly) laptop manufacturers that assume that nobody will ever want to boot anything else but Windows so they never test/implement anything else. So if Windows isn't present, the machine doesn't work ... It got so bad that Linux actually has to pretend it is Windows when reporting the system type to ACPI and other places because otherwise the motherboard will fail to boot or the firmware leaves it in a half-initialized, unusable state due to these sloppy BIOS implementations.However, to be fair, Macs aren't any better - the Mac UEFI implementation has similar (if not worse) problems. Linus Torvalds had some famous rants on this too.

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 05:18:56 pm
content: When in doubt, BIOS/MBR.I've had newer OEM laptops, even with UEFI support refuse to boot Linux. This is quickly solved by just booting using an MBR partition table, and living with only 4 primary partitions.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 06:46:13 pm
content: Quote from: TwoOfFive on July 03, 2018, 05:18:56 pmWon't necessarily work. Apart from many modern machines not supporting anything but UEFI and having no CSM support (so no BIOS/MBR for you to boot from), there are also machines that are explicitly locked down.See e.g. here:https://idiallo.com/blog/laptop-for-win8-like-mac-for-os10His UEFI laptop was locked down by the manufacturer so that nothing else but Windows would boot on it, even with secure boot off and using the legacy boot. Coincidentally, also an Asus machine.Usually lame excuses about warranty being void by installing another OS are given, the reality is that the manufacturer has a marketing contract with Microsoft and they get money for preloading Windows (and locking the machine down is often part of the contract conditions). Also Microsoft explicitly requires Secure Boot being enabled (and impossible to turn off) on all ARM machines that ship with Windows. Fortunately those are still rare but we are likely going to see more of this now.The only way to be sure that you don't buy a Windows-only lemon is to do your homework and find someone else who actually has managed to run Linux on it. Or check whether the machine is certified as compatible by some Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu does that).

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 07:13:18 pm
content: Yes that is what I thought... I have converted many machines before to Ubuntu, I have a number of different laptops with quirky BIOS settings which did not let me properly configure it or would hide menu options that I swear should have been there, only to find out after several reboots and changing configurations they suddenly appeared!I was also unsure that my ASUS laptop had some 24 GB SSD in it, in addition to the 700 GB HDD drive. The 24 GB SSD was partitioned in some strange way, I never used it and Ubuntu didn't either. Turns out this is some kind of "caching" memory store for Windows to load frequently-used files. I actually opened up the laptop and found it buried inside and clipped in a socket (inaccessible unless you completely open the case, not even HDD/memory access flaps allow you to get to it)... as I was a bit confused why even with my HDD removed it was still detecting it. For a moment there I thought of just installing Ubuntu to the SSD and booting off that, I figure a small distro with minimal GUI (Xubuntu) would work well enough in 24 GB for my purposes. However, the BIOS did not allow me to boot off that either.So in the end, here's what I did:1. Update my BIOS to the latest (still crappy) version which didn't solve anything.2. Install Windows 10 off a USB key to the 700 GB drive.3. Confirm I was not crazy and saw my machine booted Windows no problem.4. Turn off all the BIOS secure boot garbage it re-instated.5. Immediately, installed Ubuntu back OVER Windows 10.6. Ubuntu cut up the 700 GB HDD (/dev/sda) into 2 partitions (gpt):/dev/sda1: 512 M EFI System/dev/sda2: 698.1 GB Linux filesystem7. I used GParted to set up the 24 GB SSD as the "linux-swap" partition (/dev/sdb)- configured Ubuntu to not use the standard swap file and use /dev/sdb1 instead.8. Copied all my backup of my home folder BACK to the new machine.9. Upgraded Ubuntu to the latest release/dates.10. Re-installed all my apps again from scratch.11. Dragged my /.wine/ folder back in and got some to work, others reinstalled.12. Working on getting my VirtualBox VMs back to working under the new system.- lots of permissions/command-line configs I need to do to get them workingTOTAL TIME SPENT: Entire ffff@%$$#&cking day!Whatever screwed up the machine in the first place was something in Ubuntu, I know that. But the fact that I could not recover it with ANY of the boot-repair and various grub and boot-manager installers (because the ASUS BIOS was pretty much useless) is what bothered me even more. The only way back was to stick Windows on there, and then Ubuntu "magic" hooks somehow got in after. By the way the machine has a big sticker on the bottom saying "ASUS Windows 8", notice it on this back plate:That's why I'm thinking maybe these large laptop makers make a deal with Microsoft for cheap volume discounting on licenses by forcing the machines to Windows only and not allowing (or making it extremely difficult) to try to get any other competing OS to be able to boot on the machine. Sad that this should be the case and that consumers are not being warned enough. This seems like something that should fall under the anti-trust lawsuit a few years back, perhaps they found another loophole. PC's should be following open standards that provide a level playing field to competitive OS makers and not cripple-firmwares to ensure only Microsoft knows the "secret sauce" to play nice. Wow.

author: rdl
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 07:43:43 pm
content: If they're really pulling that kind of crap it needs to be plainly stated, in big letters, in several places so that it can't be over-looked.I guess Asus is now on my never buy, never recommend list, but how many other manufacturers do the same?

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 09:12:49 pm
content: Quote from: edy on July 03, 2018, 07:13:18 pmThey have been doing this for many years, it is not exactly news. Microsoft gives OEMs both heavy discounts on Windows licenses (essentially gives them away) and pays marketing money for putting Windows on the computers (not just laptops, they have been doing this for years with desktops too). That gives them a rather big stick and leverage should the OEM decide to do something "improper", such as offering computers without an OS or with a competitors' OS. Few OEMs in the PC market can afford to lose this money or to have the costs of the licenses jacked up, especially when the margins are razor thin there.It is a well documented thing - e.g. when Dell was experimenting with offering computers with Linux, it has caused an intense pressure and lobbing from Microsoft and after a while they had to pull those machines. Then for a long time only servers were offered with Linux, never a desktop. Oh and a PC with a Linux preloaded was more expensive than the same hw including a Windows license, even though Linux was free and Windows was about $100 retail for an OEM license. Go figure why that was ...Quote from: edy on July 03, 2018, 07:13:18 pmSadly they know how to play both the market and the politicians. This behavior is going on for at least a decade if not more. Oh and if you didn't know, guess who sets the UEFI standards for things like Secure Boot and who is holding the signing keys without which no software will boot on a machine with Secure Boot enabled - Microsoft. Yep, if you want to boot Linux on SB enabled machine, you have to have the bootloader signed by Microsoft ...It has caused a big stir few years back when this Secure Boot idea was introduced and ultimately Microsoft had to backpedal on the idea that SB has to be mandatory and only the OEMs can add the keys into BIOS. The big datacenter players on the market forced them to open this so that you can add your own key and run e.g. your own Linux kernel. MS also had to cryptographically sign some "shim" code that permits booting of Linux without adding those keys. However, they kept all this for ARM devices as a condition of licensing Windows to OEMs (that was at the time when MS thought that WindowsRT will be a thing on phones and tablets).There is only one way to fix this - vote with your feet and don't buy hardware like that.

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 09:26:23 pm
content: Quote from: rdl on July 03, 2018, 07:43:43 pmYeah. just be sure to make yourself a bootable Win10 USB key (https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/software-download/windows10ISO) and keep it handy just to install it to the machine, so you can immediately wipe it clean again with OS of your choice.Windows 10, the largest "hard drive bootloader preparation tool" in existence.Seriously.By the way, I was surprised at how easy it was to re-instate my VirtualBox VM's. I previously had all my VM's all in a folder called /home/VirtualBoxVMs as separate subdirectories:/home/VirtualBoxVMs/AndroidPC/home/VirtualBoxVMs/MacOSHighSierra/home/VirtualBoxVMs/Win10/home/VirtualBoxVMs/WinXPModeAll I had to do was copy them all back to the same place, and in VirtualBox go to Machine menu, click Add and choose the respective "vbox" files in each directory and voila! They were all back in, all machines resumed from the last instance and ran fine!Ok, so while the day was not a complete waste, I did manage a few things to improve my general setup, and to learn about getting things working again, which will hopefully pay off in the even of another catastrophe in the future:1. I am now back to XFCE4 (default in Ubuntu Studio) not Gnome Desktop, which was doing some weird crash periodically and freezed me up a minute while "apport" ran in the background. Not sure if that was Gnome or Conky tools. Either way, it's gone. I miss Gnome though, it looked slick. But XFCE4 does the job and is light weight.2. My partition setup is way cleaner, not so much wasted space. Before I had some remnants from the previous system. Now I managed to move my swapfile over to the 24GB SSD which I never used before, and only 2 partitions on the main HDD. Lots of space.3. In the process I forced myself to update to "bionic", as I was previously on either "zesty" or possibly "artful" (my install media was "artful" and then I did a do-release-upgrade to "bionic" until I make myself a new install key).4. Learned a heck of a lot about ASUS, Windows, Ubuntu and how to recover my system from scratch (and made plenty of notes in a text file so that if it happens again I can just follow the script and not need to search online for everything again).5. Lots of chmod and chown's required on my backups to take ownership of them again, even having used same username/password on the reinstalled Ubuntu. Used FreeFileSync to do the backups (run it with sudo otherwise will fail to copy some files) on my $HOME dir was all I needed, that's where I keep my data. Everything else gets configured again anyways when stuff reinstalls so I never backup apps.What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.Quote from: janoc on July 03, 2018, 09:12:49 pmWow, did not know! It is ridiculous that they have such power over the computer market. With Linux distros becoming every more user friendly it is absurd most people are still on Win10 when all they do is the most basic tasks (web-based browsing, media player, etc). Since Microsoft can't sell anyone an update, and Apple started giving their MacOS away with a bunch of apps, and if Microsoft is pursuing a subscription model, how long can they keep hardware-makers locked in? They need to force the OS to be registered at time of install by the manufacturer, otherwise any company can just install the unlicensed free Win10 ISO, and then the consumer has a choice to purchase a license or wipe it. Then again, I give too much credit to the average computer purchaser who probably doesn't really care and doesn't want the trouble of trying to configure a Linux system. I am surprised that Microsoft feels such a threat from Linux though, surely it can't be the reason why they are doing this. I think it's just laziness on the part of BIOS makers and the poor/loose/badly documented implementation of UEFI.

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 03, 2018, 09:46:19 pm
content: Quote from: edy on July 03, 2018, 07:13:18 pmThanks for sharing. When I was working with that machine, I too dislike the BIOS. I do like the display however.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2018, 12:23:17 am
content: Yes, UEFI is a horrible bloated monstrosity of an invention, designed clearly with vendor lock-in in mind and monopoly-through-complexity. Amusingly enough, a week ago I booted Linux on a mid-2000s PC with no problem at all.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 04, 2018, 07:25:27 pm
content: Quote from: amyk on July 04, 2018, 12:23:17 amThat's not really true, let's not see a conspiracy behind every corner. UEFI comes from the EFI standard which was used by Unix workstations and servers back in the day, originally developed by Intel. There is nothing "bloated" or "vendor lock-in" in it as such.The old BIOS way of booting PCs was fine when you had a disk with a single partition and maybe a gig or two max capacity. And BIOS actually provided useful services to DOS. With modern OS-es the BIOS was a vestigial crutch that forced some crazy workarounds to make larger disks usable and the only thing it was actually used for was loading the OS bootloader (or a virus that just so happened to sit in the MBR). It was immediately abandoned and never returned to afterwards.UEFI addresses all this in a way that is both extensible and universal, so you can have things such as various diagnostic or recovery tools boot directly, without having to rely on DOS, Windows and what not. You can have an actual boot manager that will boot every OS present on the system without having to rely on 3rd party software. UEFI also understands the concept of disks and partitions, so you can easily point the boot process to whatever system you want to boot. With BIOS it was always loading those 512 bytes at the beginning of the first disk, requiring hacks, such as swapping disks (whether physically or logically) when you wanted to boot another system. Or a 3rd-party bootloader.You can also secure the machine against unauthorized software. That actually matters - malware that intercepts the OS boot and loads before the OS is a huge problem because no antivirus will ever detect it thanks to the virtualization capabilities of modern hw. That was the purpose of Secure Boot and for this application it makes a lot of sense to have it. However, Secure Boot is an optional part of the UEFI spec and has been added only quite late. You don't need Secure Boot if you want to have machine working with UEFI.Then there are machines which simply never had PC-like BIOS, even if they ran Intel CPUs - e.g. Macs.That there are buggy implementations on the market and that some companies use these features for nefarious purposes or to stifle competition is not really fault of the standard. The old BIOS was/is buggy as hell too and if an OEM wanted to mess with the customers, it was quite easy to add some proprietary hack preventing an "unauthorized" OS from running. Or simply never release drivers for the hardware, except for their patched version of Windows. It was quite common.If you want a quick rundown of the advantages of UEFI over the old BIOS style of booting, this article is quite decent:https://fossbytes.com/uefi-bios-gpt-mbr-whats-difference/Here is UEFI described in a bit more detail, including Secure Boot:https://www.happyassassin.net/2014/01/25/uefi-boot-how-does-that-actually-work-then/

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2018, 10:26:32 pm
content: Quote from: janoc on July 04, 2018, 07:25:27 pmI read the Intel document on UEFI saying more or less the same happy horse (something). But, it is hard to square that with actual end user experience.At least both the OP and myself stayed away from the secure boot. The MBR/2tb issue can be remedied with a relatively small change in BIOS rather than a behemoth new system. What other UEFI features are making user stand in line to buy?BIOS should be just that - B there stands for Basic.The way I see it, UEFI is the software equivalent of the Rube Goldberg Machine.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2018, 01:37:19 am
content: Quote from: janoc on July 04, 2018, 07:25:27 pmMicrosoft-Intel are masters of advertising their design choices as motivated by reasonable sounding objectives and vaguely believable evolution paths. But in actual fact, it's a lie. Their true objectives are always extremely hostile and damaging to user capabilities. MS-Intel are _solely_ aiming for total control of the entire computing market, total control of users, total lock-in, total spyware, total DRM-control of what people can run and see on their machines, absolutely closing the box so nothing but MS code can be installed.Any time Microsoft seems to be backing off some draconian measure (like making UEFI an absolute lock-in to MS-Windows) it just means they are temporarily biding their time, till they can stealthily reach the same goal by incremental complexity creep."let's not see a conspiracy behind every corner"No, let's DO see everything MS does as a conspiracy. Because 'conspiracy against the public interest' is the most accurate characterization of everything MS wants and does. They have decades of proving this, and nothing to indicate MS will ever change.Don't trust Microsoft's supposed 'embrace' of Linux and open source either. That's more like enemy infiltration of the camp. Really dangerous.

author: janoc
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2018, 03:01:22 pm
content: Quote from: Rick Law on July 05, 2018, 10:26:32 pmWhat end user experience are you talking about? 99.9% of PC users don't even know that something has changed and the only time they get to see anything UEFI related is when, you guessed it, having to deal with Secure Boot because of some retarded OEM forcing it on. But that's hardly fault of the UEFI standard.And I have certainly never heard Mac users complain about UEFI neither.Quote from: Rick Law on July 05, 2018, 10:26:32 pmNo it can't. The BIOS can't address such disk anymore because of the limits of 32bit numbers which are used in the disk/partition description. So with the MBR scheme you are either stuck or would have to make an ad-hoc, incompatible hack. That's not really a solution.Quote from: Rick Law on July 05, 2018, 10:26:32 pmEnd user doesn't and shouldn't care. But UEFI (BIOS neither) is not there for the end user but for the OS developers and system integrators (i.e. the people putting the computers together).The advantages, for ex:* Better partitioning scheme (not limited to <2TB disk, not limited to 4 partitions, etc)* CRC32 checks for the data so corruption can be detected* No "magic" 512 bytes on the first disk sector to boot a system are necessary, UEFI can load an OS directly, multibooting is supported natively (not necessarily booting of multiple OS-es but e.g. the various recovery partitions).* BIOS can access only 1MB of RAM (runs in real mode!), UEFI has access to the entire memory. This is important - even Linux boot images are often larger than 1MB when decompressed and have to use all sorts of nasty tricks to work this limitation around when booting in BIOS mode. For example booting in multiple stages in order to get into protected mode as soon as possible and only then loading the actual kernel and booting the machine. This is a big problem if you e.g. need some device drivers to boot the machine - e.g. a RAID, or a networking stack (booting over network). It can be done but it is getting more and more difficult as OSes get more complex and larger.* Consequence of above - any UEFI sw can be written in normal C, there is no need to having to resort to hand-written assembly in order to squeeze every single byte out of the 1MB of RAM available for booting.* Security - yes, Secure Boot. When correctly implemented it is actually a valuable security tool when hardening servers, for example.Quote from: Rick Law on July 05, 2018, 10:26:32 pmWell, it isn't like that. Modern PCs have long outgrown the BIOS which was designed to support stuff like CP/M and DOS in the early 80s and didn't change all that much since.Yes, there are bad implementations of UEFI. But that doesn't mean that BIOS is better or we could stick with it forever. And it is a moot point anyway - all PCs sold are sold with UEFI firmware since a few years anyway, so if you don't like it, you will have to change to ARM or something else.

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2018, 05:33:29 pm
content: Quote from: janoc on July 06, 2018, 03:01:22 pmWhere? Google search.reddit.com ---- I think UEFI is a step backward from BIOS, not forward ...ycombinator.com ---- EFI Sucks (2012) | Hacker Newsaskubuntu.com ---- lenovo - UEFI or Legacy? Which is advised and why? - Ask Ubuntutechrights.org ---- UEFI Sucks, Suggests a Growing Consensus | Techrightstheregister.co.uk ---- Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch • The ...I can spend the rest of my days copy/pasting negative comments. You may say, with anything new, you can always find negative comments. That is true, but most of the negative comments you will find is not about imperfection but instead they are about the foundamentals - UEFI doesn't work as advertise.Quote from: janoc on July 06, 2018, 03:01:22 pmCome now, even an 8 bit CPU can be coded to deal with a 64 bit variable easily or even 256 bit easily. Carry flag in CPU is not exactly a new invention.Quote from: janoc on July 06, 2018, 03:01:22 pmYeah, users should have to care - unless it is an impediment to their ability/flexibility in using the machine.Magic 512 sector, > 1mb, etc, etc, etc,The whole idea of the flexible boot process is to read in a small program to load a larger one. The reading in of the small program should be the only thing needed. The rest should be up to the larger program being booted. That was the trusted and tried method to achieve flexibility. It seems that the UEFI designer didn't learn that. Instead, it tries to cook you dinner and serve dessert.They should know using a high level language like C is not exactly appropriate for something that should be low level. This choice is no doubt one of the many reasons why this UEFI thing is buggy, sluggish, and unpredictable. Something as basic as hardware startup should be as deterministic as possible. Instead, they use a high level language. High level language means it needs a load of back-end support codes. Such huge back-end inevitably reduce efficiency and increase unpredictability. If they want to replace a BIOS, at least hire a staff that can do assembler.There are zillions of ways to achieve eliminating the "magic sector". Some more efficient, some less. The non-volatile memory (on the PC being booted) can be used to store a non-static MBR location, etc, etc. There are zillions of better way to do it than UEFI/GPT. Besides, the idea of a universal unique identifier is nutty. Now I can have a universal look-up table on cracked security passwords.RAID? Raid has been booted since the early days of the PC with far less resources. That is what add-on cards with their own BIOS do. Why would you want to lock that into the server BIOS for? That creates yet another flexibility killer. More dead weights.This idea of UEFI doing everything is not the way to achieve flexibility. It is the idea of hiring a programmer who can be your receptionist, customer support agent, make collection calls on late payment, clean bath room...Quote from: janoc on July 06, 2018, 03:01:22 pmJust because UEFI is new doesn't mean that it is good idea. Many new ideas are seeds of future success. Many new ideas are failed dead seeds. According to folklore, it took Thomas Edison 3000 tries to find the right material for the light bulb. UEFI is one of those 2999 that didn't work.Both MS and Intel (and some others) are companies with the size to push users into solutions with bigger benefit for themselves than for the users.Even Andy Grove himself wrote a book called "Only the paranoid survive". I am paranoid. I don't believe what a vendor says just because they wrote nice well formatted white-paper telling me how great their solution is.It is of course good to try something new - that is a learning process. Some learning process leads to success, some learning process leads to failure. My view is, UEFI is one of those failures to learn from.

author: Nominal Animal
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2018, 09:06:22 pm
content: Quote from: edy on July 03, 2018, 12:57:33 amAround the time UEFI and Secure Boot was invented, Asus made some kind of deal with Microsoft (cannot recall the details, but I believe it was something about cooperation and signing keys in the BIOS itself), and since then, many of Asus' motherboards have issues booting into Linux.I used several Asus motherboards and even swore by them in the nineties (as they were arguably the best desktop motherboards then), but stopped using them as UEFI and Secure Boot became available.Quote from: edy on July 03, 2018, 12:57:33 amI only have maintenance and installation experience on HP Elitebooks (820, 830) and on older HP Pavilion 11 (n000e0). When it came out, the Pavilion lacked touch support (although I did manage to port the driver from Android kernels, the devs soon ported it to Linux upstream, too). Laptop makers who care, do seem to push their drivers upstream -- which is obviously sensible, because it then means that to they won't need to spend much resources at all to have ongoing kernel support. Ubuntu and Mint distributions have basically full support out of the box since mid-2016, if you use the 64-bit versions. To install a pure Linux on the machines, you do need to use a 64-bit kernel, go into the EFI and fiddle with the settings before installation, but after that, I've had no issues even when reinstalling.Granted, I have not attempted to enable SecureBoot with Grub2, because I know that with physical possession and sufficient time, you can boot anything you want. For the last decade or so I do not have anything sensitive (other than my own personal data) on the machines, so I don't even bother to encrypt my home partition.There are a few (possibly surprising) ways I recommend that might look like extra work up front, but may save you a surprising amount of work if you have issues.When you boot up the machine for the first time, go into the EFI/BIOS settings, and write down (take pictures of) all the settings. Then, enable booting off USB, and disable HD booting (just to make it easier to correctly boot off the USB, and not to accidentally trigger the first-time special boot the machine might have).Boot off a Linux Live USB stick. The distribution does not matter much which, but I prefer the non-X, command-line only ones.Grab an image of the initial few hundred megabytes of the disk, at least covering the entire EFI partition. (It may be easier to grab just the boot sectors, and the EFI partition separately, as the EFI partition is easier to mount and restore if as a separate file.) You only needddto do this (and it is one of the coreutils, so it is always installed). To find out which block devices are which, you can investigate/sys/block/DEVNAME/device/{model,serial,uevent}.If you have a large enough external USB disk available, take a full image of the disk. This allows you to restart the installation, or revert it completely. (If you need to compress it, usexzcompression. If the unused portions of the disk are filled with zeroes, the image will compress extremely well. Typically, unused sectors will have garbage, in which case the disk won't compress too well.)Some manufacturers like Asus do seem to require a MS Windows boot sector or EFI files, and having an image of those allows you to restore them if necessary.With those available, and another machine to trawl the net if problems arise, one can install Linux if it is at all possible for that machine.If you have a machine that can only boot in legacy mode, make a < 512 MiB boot partition (mounted at/bootas the very first partition). The BIOS only needs to be able to access the boot partition, to be able to boot Linux. The boot partition will contain the Linux kernels, and their associated initial ramdisks (containing drivers, firmwares, and initial boot scripts they might need). When the Linux kernel boots up from that initial ramdisk, it then mounts the drives using direct access, so BIOS limits don't matter anymore.On machines containing spinning disks, I always check the SMART data. In my smallish sample (maybe a couple of dozen different HDDs, plus a couple of HPC clusters), the raw reallocated sector count is the best indicator of disk reliability I've found. No, it's not very reliable either, but it's the best thing I've found. If I want a drive to last five years or longer, it better not have any reallocated sectors at all when I get it, nor develop any in the first month or so of use. If it does, I can't trust it, even though there is no guarantee it will fail. If after the first six months or so the disk reallocates sectors, I get suspicious; one bunch within one day, if in the single digits, is acceptable. (That is just a tiny manufacturing defect the sector reallocation machinery is designed to cater for.) If the number starts increasing, it is time to swap the drive ASAP, before it conks out.Note that due to bad experiences, I do not use Seagate drives at all, so I cannot say whether the above approach is sane or works on those at all.SSD disks are much harder to evaluate, and I don't know if there is even sufficient data to make any gross estimates anyhow.