[u-u] How to brick your laptop

[William Park]

This may be off-topic...

I liked UEFI until I had to move my disks to another machine.  I
couldn't boot, because the boot entries were on the old motherboard's
non-volatile memory!  So, I went back to MBR.
-- 
William

On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 07:09:26PM -0500, Doug Lee wrote:
> Many commentors to this article claim that it is bad firmware design and
> that the EFI spec, if followed correctly, does not allow this to happen.
> It is also pointed out that you may recover by re-programming the EEPROMS
> with an external programmer if the firmware files are available.
> Another comment suggests that dual bios motherboards are not a cure as the
> variables may be stored in  a separate EEPROM. Someone suggests that MSI
> motherboards are particularly bad.
> 
> https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=UEFI-rm-root-directory
> 
> On Tue, 2 Feb 2016, Dan Astoorian wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 02 Feb 2016 12:46:51 EST, "D'Arcy J.M. Cain" writes:
> >>On Tue, 2 Feb 2016 10:51:32 -0500
> >>arocker at Vex.Net wrote:
> >>>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/02/delete_efivars_linux/
> >>>
> >>>A somewhat implausible scenario, but it's clearly happened.
> >>
> >>I'm having a hard time believing this one.  Linux may have some silly
> >>designs but if you boot up a CD then what's on the disk can't matter
> >>can it?  A brand new drive also does not have those files but you can
> >>still install an OS on it.
> >
> >The problem appears to be that Linux exposes UEFI variables in the
> >firmware using a pseudo-filesystem interface, and some BIOSes respond
> >less gracefully than others to having all of their UEFI variables
> >deleted.
> >
> >-- 
> >Dan Astoorian, Systems Administrator
> >Engineering Computing Facility
> >University of Toronto
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> >
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