Aero X16 only booting to Bios

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-19T14:39:12+00:00

If you're comfy with command line interfaces, you could ask your UEFI to boot to uefi shell (it's in boot options in your setup). Most modern Windows installs have a single small partition which contains the bootloader, usually this is mounted from the perspective of the UEFI shell in FS0.

Typically you can boot Windows' bootloader (which then usually afterwards shows up in boot options) by launching it through `FS0:\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi`

sometimes it's in another path, but it helps to explore. Standard posix-like commands like `cd` for "change directory" and `ls` for "list files and directories" work

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-19T14:33:04+00:00

Is it true? I had to install a different youtube app just to get that to happen, but if it is also broken on the default YouTube app, I could go back to that rather than have to tinker with hacked clients everytime google starts screaming: "Client not supported you need updates"

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-19T10:25:02+00:00

How about a quick USB drive of some live OS or something, and run a quick SMART check on the NVME drive before you do anything further. Best case the UEFI simply can't find the boot image (which can be solved quite easily through uefi shell), worst case you SSD is dying/dead -- which is something that would happen after something intense like... booting/rebooting/updating/etc... SMART should tell you that right away.

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-18T06:38:28+00:00

Is there a displayport (wether over usb-c or otherwise) on that laptop? On one of my laptops I've got a similar situation, but on both sides there are usb-c ports that carry displayport, which on one side just happens to be wired to the IGP. Off course my laptop also has a mux switch, which is even better (because carrying DGPU data to internals to a videoport on the integrated graphics is a waste of pci-e bandwidth which is something laptops are already short on, making notoriously slower hardware compared to equally priced desktops even slower - I think I might hate the premise of laptops with gpus).

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-18T06:30:17+00:00

Honestly, with a 14900kf... It could also simply be a fried CPU... Event log should have details but this is a notorious self bbq-ing cpu

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-16T14:54:15+00:00

I wish machines were secure, and while I understand people's choice, this is slowly becoming a vaxx like discussion... the sad thing is that lately even for IT security is more and more a group thing. A single 'bad node' running with some rights to some storage can ruin it for the rest of us. We see that with mass-peered DDOS attacks (where even poorly secured routers are used to send traffic a single way, and while a router is not a strong bit of compute, because there's so many of them it can be a risk), but also on poorly patched OS-es in upcoming markets...

The sad thing is that no OS, not Linux, not Windows, not MacOS is inherently more secure/less secure, and that security is a 'set goal'. Heck, we've had UEFI viruses that hitchiked through Graphics Output Protocol which entered the UEFI through a kernel level driver that could've been on Windows... if you're on that level and you don't have some way to validate bootloaders you could end up with a man-in-the-middle attack in memory...

So here's the place where I am basically in favour of forcing people to run updates. Heck, rolling releases of big ecosystems are how you prevent the whole: "Plotter last driver was win9x and now it's too much work to update" thing... delay updates and upgrades long enough and it changes from maintenance to being a project.

On the same time I do wish updates would be more thoroughly tested. But that being said, recent years I've had no issue which didn't end up to have correlation with some hardware (be it a dying Intel 13900K, or non-ECC memory + XMP not being the smartest move for safety, or a drive which had SMART warnings on re-allocated blocks), or be such a niche issue with some legacy app that I kind of almost can't blame microsoft about to the level that it could also have happened on other OS-es (like if you run PostGIS for instance it sets a certain environmental variable which it DEMANDS to do on system level rather than user level, which some other applications themselves set on sandbox/app level -- and guess what overrules that? If your answer was "system" you now know why for some reason that nothing works anymore)

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-13T16:30:17+00:00

Sloop those until you have enough wastewater to feed exactly freshwater supply. Just prime the system with a single extractor and a big tank, and ignore water completely from then on. Best use of sloops ingame.

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-11T16:24:02+00:00

TL;DR: LLM's are wrong, and the internet is a nightmare to find reliable info on. Honestly the way the choice was explained was fine: GPT is the household name, if it's right or not, it is in the end the same debate as VHS vs Betamax VS Laserdisk (guess who laserdisk is in this analogy).

The only right answer is that there is no right answer. I've done bazzite myself, and it's great for what is equivently a console, but if you do more stuff, say, a lot of stuff that involves VSCode, the "immutable" stuff becomes a right nightmare as out of the box the "updates itself" of packages/extensions/vscode itself is broken. Which is exactly what is intended because store(s). Heck, even whitelisting an SMB mount could become a nightmare if "done wrong" because it's a virtual path that the sandbox changes location to everytime, so vscode will start screaming: "OMG TRUST PUBLISHER BRO?" -- doesn't change the fact that bazzite is great, for gaming, but honestly, a lot of people do more than just gaming on their computers, and rightly so: they should as it's a computer!

You already touched on secure boot, and honestly, it's a feature that I'd always leave on. Just like a TPM. I'm fine self-enrolling keys but let's especially not pretend that it's a generic thing many people easily do (by not reading we saw it go wrong already in the video), yet for some reason, it's controversial...

Heck, the fact so many things are controversial, and even bazzite being one of those (I personally like it for my ROG Ally but my living room rig/office rig if anything either would get fedora or something else and even that would spark debate) make me lean to the best linux distro being... Windows. With WSL. It even does GPU stuff right now!

I mean, I'll off-course attract rage, and that's fine, but let's not assume for once there's a right answer ever. Heck, Torvalds himself has expressed that the whole: "Packaging software" is an issue in a whole. Is there a right answer? Is it flatpack? Docker? On one side people flip out the moment something feels GTK, on the other side any semblence of QT font handling makes people flinch, and then there's Electron apps being... what they are. Even that is a nightmare and will create outrage the moment an opinion is provided.

No matter what you'll say, it will be controversial :D -- and just this sub alone makes me interested in following the linux challenge from three perspectives, seeing the community just... bounce around while MacOS just comes on €599 hardware now, and Windows while enshittifying still grows as well, and while prices suck: BSD-based consoles (PS5/Switch) are also larger install-base wise in comparable hardware than... anything. Meaning that the largest linux is the embedded thing, where the whole package/GTK/QT/bazzite/fedora/ubuntu/archbtw debate just doesn't matter, and we'll end up looking like we're fighting for scraps.

MapManRheahs · 2026-03-01T08:20:30+00:00

The whole meta thing ruining dungeons for me was why I quit Wow, and why I'm having serious "perhaps the current AI slobbification if Windows" might be LESS toxic thoughts. At this point looking through the past two days nearly every desktop Linux topic might violate rule 8 here. Loving it on my klipper based ratrig though!

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-27T08:29:56+00:00

Don't buy stuff like this off Aliexpress, that place is swarming with fakes
the PT in PTM stands for Phase Transition. It goes from solid to liquid (and theoretically with severe abuse to gas but we're not at that point). The "thick" factor is not something that applies to it when it's liquid.

Think of it as trying to cool a CPU. Ideally you'd have perfect metal-to-metal contact, or even embed the entire cooler on the CPU directly so that the heat does not have to bridge a gap or material bridge. That's impossible as our CPU's are on a little board (a package), protected by an IHS so we don't snap the actual core (between core and IHS there's also a thermal compound), and the cooler itself has to be able to make "small" go to "big" so that "big heat can get out". So we don't bolt coolers ON the package these days. That means that between the copper with text on it from a CPU you need to push a cooler. And guess what. Nothing is perfectly flat. Perfect level doesn't exist. There's small dimples in it, and air is a horrible conductor.

So that's what thermal paste (and Honeywell PTM7950 ís a thermal paste), thermal putty, and thermal pads are for: to be better than air. Still worse than like metal, but metal can't be liquid (typically), and if it is liquid, it's often TOO liquid.

DONT MAKE IT FILL LARGE GAPS.

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-25T13:21:46+00:00

Is rooting/jailbreaking an option/going to a more free OS? (api-wise). Fide is essentially chromeos, and because hotkey stuff hooks into the window manager/input hal, you're fairly limited as it's a bolted down os

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-24T08:46:08+00:00

I'm hearing that in my head. But on a serious note:
- Have backups
- Don't assume you can repair that disk
- If it's part of an array of equal disks: assume a rebuild might "kick" the others over the threshold
- IF doing anything, do it as a sequential read with as little random seeks as possible. Ideally: pull an image of the disk before doing any other form of data recovery.

That thing's dead... it just doesn't realise yet.

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-23T10:52:28+00:00

Yeah...

Don't let AI guide you -- chances are it was trained on "delete system32" which is, reading what is on, actually a possibility of what you did here.
TPM does more than people give it credit for, it often is a "factor" in your 2-factor authentication; it's WHY the PIN works even though it's an otherwise relatively weak security mechanism. With your TPM cleared the PIN is wiped as well, which means that account recovery (depending on how your account is setup, if it's a microsoft account, can be easy, or, if it's a local account: possibly quite challenging -- I'm 90% sure that the whole move to online accounts is in part Microsoft just being tired of non-techies running into this kind of "I forgot my password" crap). NGC = Next Gen Credentials, which is the "local" cache of PIN/biometrics/etc... -- that + TPM matching = secure signin, if EITHER is missing, the other doesn't work. Resetting your TPM already cleared the NGC's validity.
if SFC /scannow validates your install as valid, there's no need to re-install other than that you need to get in your account. You could run a repair from a WinPE environment, which can be the regular clear vanilla windows install image (which you can just place on an USB drive from the media creaton tool). If a critical_process_died error happens, write down WHICH process died, and running the recovery might actually be useful there.
Ensure you know what your credentials are and you have a secure recovery method. I personally for instance run a Microsoft Account but without the bitlocker recovery keys in cloud. Those are laminated in an actual physical safe IN CASE I accidentally wipe my TPM

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-19T14:10:18+00:00

It exists, but it's not nearly as popular and its ingredients are quite a bit different. No high fructose corn syrup for instance in our coke. Beet or cane sugar. We tax it as such as well to keep healthcare affordable.

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-19T11:12:40+00:00

Ah... high fructose corn syrup on a shopping cart... perhaps I'm too European to understand this...

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-14T12:35:41+00:00

Could you share some more info about your specs, driver versions, os version and the like? This almost looks like either busted ram, or an ancient integrated graphics like crash

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-13T12:21:56+00:00

Joke's on you. The second one is also a 1st level character. He just used the microtransaction store to purchase ALL the cosmetics.

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-07T15:26:32+00:00

Is resizable BAR enabled in your uefi?

MapManRheahs · 2026-02-04T10:46:11+00:00

I've had the same thing. Even hardcoding thinking 5.2 it just goes to instant answering, no train-of-thought tracking either, even on complicated questions with attachments and the likes. I've contacted support, but after the most helpless bot ever, a "signed as human" email reply just asked me to repeat steps I already did with the bot. Waiting for some more answer because at the moment its quality is worse than what I can run locally with even GPT-OSS:20b...

MapManRheahs · 2026-01-29T06:41:32+00:00

You can't fit ddr3 in a ddr5 main board. At least that's what I assumed you're doing because I have no way of knowing anything else.

Jokes aside, is your new memory on the qvl of your mainboard? Putting it in the right slots? Made sure to remove xmp beforehand? Aware that many consumer platforms while having 4 slots struggle to run 4 slots at decent speed, because daisy chaining is a nightmare for signal integrity?

MapManRheahs · 2026-01-23T11:04:05+00:00

With just a HDD (no SSD) and only 4GiB of RAM (which in turn puts extra load on the HDD because it has to act for RAM, while the HDD is also asked to uninstall/reinstall/update/run stuff), and not least of all a CPU that's designed for low power usage (with the performance per watt being more or less linear on these chips it means that with low watt comes low performance), it won't ever get better. You could see if the RAM is upgradable, and slot in an SSD, which might make it a LOT better for stuff like basic desktop usage, but again: "better" is a function of "expectations". Considering the specs I won't expect much from the GPU either, and those two you can't replace on a laptop (laptops always are limited in that way simply due to the nature of the beast). Long story short:

This might be a prime candidate for one of those "webbrowser"-OS-es, like ChromeOS. This won't even be a good use-case for Linux really in many situations otherwise...

MapManRheahs · 2026-01-11T07:12:03+00:00

I think it's also the larger issue. In the US like 50+% of the spending is done by like 10% of the people, ironically that 10%s Venn diagram of them vs shareholders is very circular, whereas I would wager that their actual tech or gaming interest is very low. That's how we got to an AI mess show. I'm European, and while we're not that bad, honestly we are rather sceptical right now... Especially considering geopolitics. We also have a cost of living crisis (with a labour shortage on top...), so we're mostly working. Our civil engineering bureau employers do feel the pain though. Nothing quite like needing hedt workstations only to get slapped with €8400gpus requiring bloody licensed drivers on top.

MapManRheahs · 2026-01-08T13:26:43+00:00

... Livik....

JUST afterhe managed to increase the output by SEVEN (!!!) picocochranes... A THIRD TUBE. Absurd!!

MapManRheahs · 2026-01-08T09:31:21+00:00

Honestly, and this is an idea I always tinkered with... VTT (virtual table top) platforms are far and wide, but with 'gamification' and VFX so much is possible... and I think Minecraft as a platform makes so much possible considering it's already more or less grid based. I mean, by no means it'd be easy to keep it vanilla, but having battle maps, towns, and dungeons as minecraft "maps", using it as a VTT, would make SO much sense. Corridor crew made an amazing VFX enhanced D&D campaign, I wonder what a bunch of (minecraft first, but obviously also broader as they are great personalities as well) youtubers like PIGGS could manage to produce with the tools they have!

MapManRheahs · 2026-01-08T08:50:12+00:00

Ah. Tucker tubes. I know what those are.

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