Tag: toshiba

Toshiba Dual Boot recovery

A few notes on how to restore dual boot after a Toshiba BIOS update.

Toshiba released 2 updates to my Satellite Windows 10 laptop.

One reset the power settings so that shut down got set back to quick boot and the other changed the order of the UEFI boot so that I could no longer boot into Linux.

Resetting the power options wasn’t a problem but getting Linux back was a little more problematical.

At first I feared that they’d trashed the UEFI boot settings totally so I got a Linux UEFI USB ready to go.

From Windows I took the option to reboot and pick an alternative boot device and restarted.

That was when I found out that things were not as bad as I feared because when I got to the Device selection I had two options:

  • USB
  • ubuntu

So I booted into ubuntu and everything was fine.

I searched the internet and found that the efibootmgr command was what I needed to use … and this is what it showed me:

How they left it.
How they left it.

As you can see the Timeout is set to 0 but the boot order has been changed so that 0002 (Windows) is the first option.

So I did the following:

efibootmgr -o 0001,0002,2001

and then checked the boot menu again:

How it should be
How it should be

I then rebooted and everything worked perfectly.

So if you’ve lost your boot menu then you might be able to get it back extremely easily….

Linux

At the weekend I replaced the broken power connector on our old Toshiba SA30. I tidied it up, defragged it all and then applied the latest set of Microsoft patches.

Thats where it all went wrong – system just hung on reboot. Booting in safe mode it showed windows crapping out on mup.sys

Now as the Tosh comes with only a “product recovery” CD there is no access to the recovery console so its blat the disk and start again

So I go and dig out the “product recovery” CD.

Hmm, Toshiba obviously have a different interpretation of “recovery” than me because its a complete pigs breakfast. Stuff doesn’t work properly and its a complete pain.. two steps forward and three steps back.

I could I guess, get an OEM XP disk from work and key in the product code on the bottom of the laptop.

Or I could just wipe the whole damned thing and shove something like Ubuntu ( www.ubuntu.com ) or SLED ( www.novell.com/products/desktop/ )

Thats the problem Microsoft and the manufacturer lackeys – they make things so complicated when things go wrong that you just can’t be arsed trying to conform to their neo-fascistic ideas that you just say “sod it all” and ignore them.