[GTALUG] Toshiba Satellite L500 rejects Linux

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Giles Orr via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

Please don't be insulted by my explaining things you surely know.  I'm 
trying to make this understandable to others.

| I've recently acquired (through a friend who stopped using it) a
| Toshiba Satellite L500 - Core i3 (3rd gen?), 4G RAM.

If it is third gen, I would expect that booting from USB had been sorted 
by the time this computer was issued.  Maybe Secure Boot wasn't sorted (I 
don't remember).

Left field question: could the CMOS battery (coin cell) be flat?  That can 
cause firmware settings to be wonky.

|  I'm determined
| to get Linux onto it (preferably Debian).

Fight the good fight!  We share a folly.

|  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."

Naively, I'd take that as an HDD error.  Google surely knows better.

|  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.

Tiano was a model UEFI implementation from Intel.  It is open source.  Who 
knows what version was incorporated by Toshiba in their firmware.

| 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(?).

Perhaps it is doing something dodgy to allow it to juggle multiple images.

| 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).

Toshiba still exists, I guess.  But it has had a horrible accounting 
scandal and a horrible excursion into nuclear power.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081315/toshibas-accounting-scandal-how-it-happened.asp

It sold its PC business to Sharp in 2018 (the computers are now called 
Dynabook's, same as Alan Kay's dream design from the 1960s.

Sharp itself looked pretty wonky.  I think that it is mostly owned by 
Foxconn now.

So I would not know where to look for downloads :-)
Your machine might have become orphaned.

| 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.

Surely that is just the default behaviour.  Debian's installer must be 
able to do this or it could not install to a blank disk.

|  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.

The normal Fedora installation image is also a live Fedora.  Once you boot 
this thing, you get to choose live (with a chance to install later in the 
session) or to go straight to the installation.  Very handy if you need to 
prepare the ground (or fix it, or examine it).

The Fedora installation .iso file that you download just get dd'd to a DVD 
(too large for a CD) or USB stick.  There is no magic at this point 
selecting between MBR booting and UEFI booting.

(MBR booting is really easy from the BIOS side of things: load the first 
sector of the disk (the Master Boot Record) into RAM and jump to it (in 
i8086 mode!)  The disk partitioning etc. is not the business of the BIOS)

(UEFI booting is more complex.  UEFI looks for the ESP (uEfi System 
Partition).  The firmware has a path to a .efi file in that ESP; it runs 
that program in 64-bit mode (except for very odd systems) in an 
environment with a bunch of amenities.)

(Terminology note: MBR is sometimes used as the name of the old 
partitioning scheme (as opposed to GPT).  I'm using it as the name of a 
booting process.  MBR-booting can work with either partitioning scheme.)

The Fedora image itself is capable of being booted either MBR or UEFI.  
The Fedora installer will install on the system in the way it was booted.  
Typically, you can control which way the system boots a USB stick (BIOS 
can only boot MBR; UEFI firmware can usually boot either way, but some can 
only boot UEFI).

The controls can be disguised in the firmware setup page.  The clear 
technical terms are deemed too confusing for users.  As you say: CSM 
disabled means MBR booting cannot be done.

(CSM is a module for UEFI that lets it emulate the BIOS calls that a 
typical MBR-booted system needs to use.)

Secure Boot is a UEFI thing so if SB is enabled, anything to do with MBR 
booting (including CSM) might not be displayed by the helpful setup 
screen.

| Would this be because I burned it on a "Legacy" system?

Not in the case of Fedora.

Creating a debian installation used to be different from Fedora but they 
might have caught up.

|  Is there a
| fix for that?  Except ... I'm about 99% sure the Debian Installer USB
| stick was created on the same machine.

If you've got an MBR installation, burn it down.  We're in a UEFI world 
now.


| 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.