Hello alaskanarcher,

I found your post which supported me when I was trying to install native Fedora on the same machine. Without this thread I probably would not have come that far. Thanks to you!

Before I almost gave up seeing the same message as you, I gave it one last try:

What solved the Boot-Problem for me was simply:

Removing ALL partitions on the internal eMMC (displayed as SD-Card in Diskmanager) even those named "EFI Boot", "BIOS BOOT" and more small, labelless partitions.

That was more by an accident. I rebooted believing this would be the last time this machine would work (what to do without EFI?) but magically it booted the native Linux via SeaBIOS.

Be aware:

1. There is no guarantee that this will work on your machine too (I assume should!)

2. Because I was afraid of accidentally removing all partitions and it would probably never boot again when restarting, I opened the case again while beeing booted in the Live-CD(/USB)-Setup, and removed all screws from the board (because since yet I do not know what specific screw disables the write-protection) to run the SeaBIOS Setup again.

TLDR;

These steps solved the boot-problem for me on my CB3-431:

(This requires one to already have installed SeaBios and is able to boot from USB. Maybe step 7 is not necessary, but IF it is - you may brick your chromebook if you do not follow it)



1. Open the case to remove the HW-Protection screw (on other chromebooks it could be a jumper)

2. Boot a Live-Linux from USB-Stick

3. Remove all(!) Partitions from the eMMC, so there is only 1 empty unassigned space

4. Run Linux-Setup

5. Install Linux with automated partitioning (result could be: 3 partitions: System, Swap, Bootloader)

6. After finishing setup do NOT shutdown

7. Run JohnLewis' SeaBIOS-script again using the 1. Option (RW_LEGACY)

8. Reboot your system & (hopefully) enjoy your native tux booting directly from eMMC via SeaBios! :)



Additional information:

- I removed the Chrome-OS and any relating data, but still see the "ChromeOS-Dev-Mode Screen" on startup. (Seems unfixable to me?)

- Once before, in ChromeOSb JohnLewis' script offered me 3 Options ("based on the device" it said) while in Linux the same script only offered the 1. option (so one may never ever try the other ones..!)

- Audio still isn't working since there is no device shown in the system. (I will try to fix this soon and put the results here, if you backed up your ChromeOS data it would be great if you could send me the original "asound.state"-file because I miss it)

- Showing the Bootloader (Grub2 with fedora) is incredibly slow (means: printing char by char takes a minute or so) - I address this problem to SeaBIOS - maybe someone knows a fix for it. If I find one I will post it here.

- Your CB's Hotkeys may not work but it is very easy to fix (I used gnome-tweak-tool and the System-internal Keyboard-Shortcuts)

- I do not use Dualboot

- My Keyboard / Touchpad works

- On some distros you may need to improve touchpad sensitivity

- Most distros offer a built-in feature to enable "touch-click"

- It can be very important, that you perform [Setup & SeaBIOS-Install (without HW-Protection) & eMMC-wipe] in ONE STEP and avoid any reboot before finished!

Why screw with the screw?

JohnLewis' script does install some preconfigured magic that allows you to access boot-options to boot from USB. If you remove all partitions from the eMMC it COULD BE that this also deletes the SeaBIOS and EFI. There are partitions labeled suspicious important as you would never like to touch them (e.g. "EFI-System"). If you would shutdown after the linux-setup when you formatted the eMMC it's likely that you have no further option to boot from USB/eMMC. I work with computers for dozens of years now but it's very very rare that you ever face a situation where you really can brick a system without being possible to recover it by replacing some of its parts (HW/SW). This is why I repeatly write about that in this post. I do not know, if this is the case, and you can destroy the chromebook but on the other hand I cannot exclude it yet either. All these operations deserve serious attention!

I would be happy to hear if this worked for you, but however I cannot give any guarantees that this won't brick your edgar...

Cheers,

John

Last edited by JohnFiddle (2016-08-30 17:05:39)