2020-01-06, 4:24 AM

@Irrelative



Thank you very much for your reply, and in particular for the explicit detail you took the time to relay.



I read your post a month back and decided I'd only give it a go as a 'last resort'. You might have noted the difference in image sizes between v1.15 and v1.22, e.g. ~22MB vs ~43MB, and given the content of the v1.22 image is ~31MB then clearly copying all files from v1.22 to v1.15 image (your step 7) could never work.





Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 16.4kB 22.0MB 22.0MB primary fat16 boot Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 16.4kB 43.0MB 43.0MB primary fat32 boot



My first guess / attempt was actually to try the older efi binaries in the newer image, all being binary different. No joy!



Next, I'd noted the FAT16 vs FAT32 filesytem diff, and having verified that this change occurred in v1.17 (next public release after v1.15) and that all releases beyond that were 'dud', I thought this was the most likely culprit. I created an empty bootable FAT16 flash and pushed the v1.22 files there ..no joy!



Next I decided to try flashing v1.15 ..having wasted hours more p@ssing around with BIOS setting combinations starting from 'Load Defaults' ..and wanting to 'rule out' (ish!) the BIOS settings themselves being the culprit. Success..







Next, I bit the bullet and did .. (in full)





> geteltorito r0yuj08wd.v1.15.iso > r0yuj08wd.v1.15.img > dd if=r0yuj15wd.v1.15.img of=/dev/sdX > mount /dev/sdX /mnt/r0yuj08w.v1.15 > cd /mnt/r0yuj08w.v1.15 > rm -r FLASH/R0YET32W > cp -r path/to/bios/r0yuj15wd.v1.22/Flash/R0YET39W FLASH/



resulting in..





> find . ./ ./System Volume Information ./System Volume Information/WPSettings.dat ./System Volume Information/IndexerVolumeGuid ./FLASH ./FLASH/NoDCcheck_bootx64.efi ./FLASH/ShellFlash.efi ./FLASH/R0YET39W ./FLASH/R0YET39W/$0AR0Y00.FL1 ./FLASH/R0YET39W/$0AR0Y00.FL2 ./EFI ./EFI/Boot ./EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi



Reboot, flash.. SUCCESS, hurray! So many thanks for the idea, I now have an updated BIOS :smileyvery-happy:



However, slightly confused as to how this had worked and yet my manual bootable FAT16 flash hadn't I compared the two filesystems and then face-palmed (actually I double faced-palmed)





Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 53.5MB 52.4MB primary



..the offset! So I tried again, this time setting the fdisk's 'first sector' (incorrectly!) to 32*512=16384 (given 32 was outside the range of what fdisk allowed!) ..'last' was anything > 31MB ..so '+50M'. I then pushed ALL the v1.22 files to the image and rebooted. Success! Well.. I mean the programmer didn't yield that utterly useless error message.



Looking at the working (but only by sheer luck I imagine) file system image:





Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 8389kB 60.8MB 52.4MB primary fat16 boot

or..





Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 16384s 118783s 102400s primary fat16 boot



..to complete the exercise, i.e. doing it properly (constructing an 'identical' fat16 version of the v1.22 image) required use of 'sfdisk' to create the filesystem from sector 32 as opposed to 2048



- use fdisk to delete all partitions

> fdisk /dev/sda > d ENTER

- create new bootable FAT16 partition, starting at sector 32 (byte 16384) size 50MB

> sfdisk > 32, 50M, 6, * > write

> parted /dev/sdX print Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Disk Flags: Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 16.4kB 52.4MB 52.4MB primary fat32 boot Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32s 102399s 102368s primary fat32 boot > fdisk /dev/sdX -l Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x4767b879 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sda1 * 32 102399 102368 50M 6 FAT16

[strange how parted reports 'fat32', as default (pre-mkfs) vs fdisk reporting 'fat16'!?!]



-format the disk with the fat16 filesystem

> mkfs -t fat /dev/sdX1



..then mount, and push ALL v1.22 files to the flash disk. Reboot, flash ..success!





[note the different version in the top right corner]



Given I used multiple flash drives in this journey I'd probably rule out any possibility of this being a hardware issue. I'd expect this kind of issue to be escalated to the person responsible for packaging the ISOs ..the only nag being that '@nixalot' claims the standard recipe (geteltorito + dd) worked for him :| If it was only me then fair enough, but it bit '@Irrelative' too so I'd be very surprised if anyone could conclude 'user error' was at play here!