On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 10:52:36AM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
anyway, i've finally made myself a debian live (wheezy) bootable usb stick, and i'm about to try booting and chrooting to get grub installed so i can finally boot linux from the hard disk.
well, that didn't work. writing the debian-wheezy-live-b2-amd64-xfce-desktop+nonfree.iso file to the USB stick resulted in a partition with type 27 ("Hidden NTFS Win") - i presume that's normal (it's been a long time since i had to use anything other than pxe to install linux or run a "live" distro) The BIOS wouldn't boot it (no USB boot option at all), and windows wouldn't recognise it (wanted to format the USB stick). I updated the BIOS from the version 204 that it came with to version 310 downloaded from the ASUS web site. After reboot, an option for UEFI USB Generic Flash showed up in the BIOS boot priorities menu. Tried that, it didn't work. at all. so i returned to BIOS and found that the USB boot options had disappeared again. BUT, this time the BIOS now allows me to add a new boot option, and even lets me browse to the /efi/debian/grubx86.efi that i had earlier installed onto the EFI fs. So I did that, booted it, and finally saw the grub menu with the expected options for Debian, Debian Recovery, and Windows 7. Chose Debian and it looks like it started boot, but has been sitting on a blank screen for about 30 minutes now. The HD light on the notebook is solidly on, as is the wireless LED. This is really shitting me. i've wasted about 2 days on it now. If i can't boot debian on this notebook, it's a worthless piece of junk. anyone have any ideas on getting this working? i'd prefer to get the currently-installed-but-not-booting debian running...but my next step is likely to be to just wipe the system, turn off UEFI in the BIOS setup, and forget about dual-booting (windows isn't at all important to me, but i was hoping to come up with a workable procedure for dealing with UEFI machines because it won't be long before it's impossible to get a new m/b without it...and after i've spent so much time on it, i'd like to have something to show for it other than just knowing "Dont Do That Again") craig ps: one of the most annoying things about this is discovering just how appalling Windows still is as a user-experience. When I first booted up the notebook and plugged it in to the network, both Asus Live Upate and Windows Update wanted to download and install stuff. fair enough....it was only a few hundred MB in total, shouldn't take more than half an hour or so to dl and install them all, right? nope, wrong. it actually took about 8 hours to complete because a) they were competing with each for disk I/O, and b) worse, they both wanted to reboot several times during the process (Windows Update about three times, but Asus Live Update wanted to reboot after every thing it installed - 9 items). 12 reboots just to install about 100 little updates? before you can even begin to use the brand new machine you've just bought? this is supposed to be a compelling user-friendly experience? to add further injury, you have to sit there and wait and watch and log in again (*and* launch both Asus Live Update and Windows Update manually) after each reboot before it will continue installing the updates. What idiocy or arrogance makes Asus or Microsoft think this crap is even remotely acceptable? -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>