4 ms·

“BIOS Setup” is an actual boot menu entry. Someone clearly thought that was a good idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if they thought the same of the bloated mo

“BIOS Setup” is an actual boot menu entry. Someone clearly thought that was a good idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if they thought the same of the bloated monstrosity that is UEFI. "Let's make the setup an EFI application" sounds like a reasonable argument, but they don't realise that it's a very important application, one which should be accessible under all circumstances short of having the BIOS erased.[1] We're approaching 10 years since this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5139055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5139055 And almost 8 years since this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10999335 [1] Most if not all BIOSes on EEPROM (late 90s onwards) before UEFI had "boot block recovery" which would automatically detect if they were corrupt and attempt to recover by flashing from a specially formatted floppy disk.

jtriangle 3y ago
I've come across similar issues with OEM installs before, where it simply will not boot if anything but the OEM's factory image is installed by the OEM's install disks. Profoundly annoying, but, thankfully not commonplace and those couple times it's happened to me I've been in the return window, so, back they went. I figure that's as big of an FU as I can muster, the OEM dealing with a higher than normal return rate. Last time it was a HP laptop running a god aweful bloatware infested version of windows 8.1, never again.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Oh God fuck HP, their EFI always seems to be the most crippled yet full of BS ones. Unfortunately we currently have a deal with HP at work for workstations and had all kinds of B/S going on with the setup utility, upgrading it, enabling stuff etc. we were with Fujitsu for ages before and they mostly just had very stock looking setups that even were still good old text mode.

jtriangle 3y ago

I've come across similar issues with OEM installs before, where it simply will not boot if anything but the OEM's factory image is installed by the OEM's install disks. Profoundly annoying, but, thankfully not commonplace and those couple times it's happened to me I've been in the return window, so, back they went. I figure that's as big of an FU as I can muster, the OEM dealing with a higher than normal return rate. Last time it was a HP laptop running a god aweful bloatware infested version of windows 8.1, never again.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
Oh God fuck HP, their EFI always seems to be the most crippled yet full of BS ones. Unfortunately we currently have a deal with HP at work for workstations and had all kinds of B/S going on with the setup utility, upgrading it, enabling stuff etc. we were with Fujitsu for ages before and they mostly just had very stock looking setups that even were still good old text mode.