Hi, In some (south-west) regions of France, high-school students are currently given (for free - I mean : from our taxes) HP ProBook x360 11 G1 EE (Education Edition) laptop computers.
These computers come with Windows 10 and an HP EFI BIOS v. 01.09 to 01.11 that has no support for legacy CSM boot mode. I believe that either this UEFI BIOS has been purposely “locked against grub”, or there is a serious bug. After having disabled Secure boot, I have discovered that none of the usual (curent, latest versions as of 2017/12) Linux live USB sticks (among : Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Manjaro, PartedMagic) was able to boot on this machine. All these live USB keys normally boot using grub. Symptoms are as follows : - UEFI BIOS selection displays the USB key as "Windows boot manager" instead of the USB key make / model one is used to see on other machines ; - Selecting this just causes the screen to go black with a blinking cursor and... that's the end. - After a while I discovered that a rEFInd key ( http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/ ) IS ABLE to boot, and that it "sees" the Linux key if both inserted at the same time. - But trying to chain from rEFInd to the Linux key fails (black screen of death with blinking cursor) - Then I discovered that a Tails Linux key ( https://tails.boum.org ) boots easily with no problem at all on the machine... And this one boots from syslinux. - I also tested and found that rEFInd is also able to chain to a Tails key properly. - Then I made another experiment and try to "doctor" some Linux keys that couldn't boot (namely : Parted Magic and Manjaro) to remove grub from them and replace it with syslinux. It was not an easy task, but once done, it allowed both distros to boot easily and seamlessly. - It is worth specifying that, as soon as grub is replaced with syslinux, the machine's BIOS doesn't call the key "Windows boot manager" anymore, but properly displays its brand and model. So I can tell being 100% sure that the HP ProBook x360 11 G1 EE distributed to students in France will *NOT BOOT* any of the common, grub-based, Linux USB keys, but that it will happily boot the same keys when grub is replaced with syslinux. I cannot tell for sure if this is a purposeful lock on the machine BIOS or a serious bug somewhere, but I felt that it deserves to be documented, reported and investigated. Please copy me on replies, I'm not subscribed to this mailing-list. Best regards. ॐ -- Michel Bouissou <mic...@bouissou.net> OpenPGP ID 0xEB04D09C _______________________________________________ Bug-grub mailing list Bug-grub@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub
