On Fri, 2018-02-16 at 10:17 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
This is *definitely* not necessary. The BIOS runs before the hard disk is even read, so there has to be a way to catch it. As far as I can tell you haven't so far mentioned what the make and model of your laptop is, so everyone is just guessing. You need to read the docs for your specific machine to see what the magic key is. In fact strictly speaking you just need the make and model of the BIOS itself. If you can't find it, try running 'biosdecode' from the dmidecode package. That will at least tell you the OEM (i.e. the BIOS manufacturer).
poc
You're right - It's a Lenovo G510. It was sold as a 64-bit machine, but ISTR that I always had more success with 32-bit software. Maybe that's what's causing some of my problem.
I can't get to grips with the interface I'm seeing. There seems to be a huge amount of software that I can't find, including dmidecode. Searching returns "no results".
I have also seen signs about vmlinuz - which are incomplete when I see them, and I haven't found them since. Kernel-core is reporting hardware problems (possibly missing 3rd party drivers?). Altogether I'm more and more convinced that I have to somehow completely get rid of this install. I believe this being 64-bit is at least part of the problem.