Arch Linux

RMLangham

Member

Registered: 2021-04-18

Posts: 17

Bootloader but no boot on Asus All in One ET2411I

I just bought an old ASUS All in One ET2411I (I think it's the UKI model) with Pentium G for 20 dollars from a thrift store that thought it was a monitor. It boots to Windows 8 (?) with no problem, though it's not fast and I don't have the password for it.

It has some nice features but a gimpy processor, and I wanted to set it up as a HTPC with Arch (since it's my go to for daily use).

I disabled secure boot and flashed a recent (late 2021) Arch live USB image to a flash stick and plugged it in.

Systemd-boot came right up. But I get only black screen when selecting either of the boot options provided by the live image. Several minutes go by and nothing changes.

I immediately retried this with a different image, an Artix Linux image from a little longer ago. Exact same results.

What is going on? Does the kernel just not like this hardware?

Last edited by RMLangham (2022-02-15 03:07:46)

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Unix? You can't say that on a kids' show!

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: Bootloader but no boot on Asus All in One ET2411I

flashed a recent (late 2021) Arch live USB image to a flash stick

How did you do that, exactly?

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

RMLangham

Member

Registered: 2021-04-18

Posts: 17

Re: Bootloader but no boot on Asus All in One ET2411I

How did you do that, exactly?

I did it the way I've always made bootable USB on Linux, with dd:

pv (nameofimage).iso | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX

If you're unfamiliar, pv just copies a file to stdout with a progress bar on stderr. Semantically it's no different than doing the same operation with cat but a lot more user-friendly, and since dd defaults to stdin there's really also no difference between this and using dd on its own.

And sure, as with using just dd, occasionally there's a read write error that corrupts the image and prevents it from booting properly, but in my experience that's fairly rare and I would really doubt it would happen twice in a row. I can try again with the Arch image if you really think that would help.

These were the standard images for their respective distros when I downloaded them. The Arch image is the same one I've used to run fsck on one of my other computers' Linux partition, so I know it wasn't corrupted when I downloaded it. I also have successfully booted the Artix image before.

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Unix? You can't say that on a kids' show!

Head_on_a_Stick

Member

From: The Wirral

Registered: 2014-02-20

Posts: 9,003

Website

Re: Bootloader but no boot on Asus All in One ET2411I

You can check the USB stick for errors with

dd if=/dev/sdX bs=851783680 count=1 | sha1sum # presumes the 2022.02.01 image

The checksum should be

3f3ba996e7d8e0b15d911180682093cd8fe6b805

But it could be that the hardware is just too old for the current Arch ISO kernel version. Regressions do mount up over time.

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Jin, Jîyan, Azadî

RMLangham

Member

Registered: 2021-04-18

Posts: 17

Re: Bootloader but no boot on Asus All in One ET2411I

Sorry guys, it was just a bad flash stick I think. Once I switched to a newer one Arch boots just fine.

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Unix? You can't say that on a kids' show!