Some USB sticks become unbootable in legacy BIOS mode after first boot

Originally created by @intrigeri on #16389 (Redmine)

As per “[Tails-testers] tails 3.12rc1 becomes unbootable on bios after first use” and “[Tails-testers] Testing the 3.12 image”. OPs are phredo@protonmail.com and cangscop@gmail.com. The latter “fixed” the problem by opening the drive in gdisk and rebuilding the protective MBR; they also shared an image of the MBR + GPT header of the broken stick + the diff between that one and the fixed one.

Reports of this issue:

… where recomputing CHS fixed the problem:

1. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190123.145208.8cf06fce.en.html

… where recomputing CHS did not fix the problem:

1. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190302.084144.948cedd2.en.html (they wrote about their attempt to fix this in an email to u and me (segfault):

   I’ve tried the work-around : https://tails.boum.org/news/version_3.12/index.en.html#index2h1 ?
   root # sgdisk —recompute-chs /dev/bilibop
   It won’t work neither. (by stand-alone boot on 3.12.1)
   The symptom remains the same.

… where we don’t know whether recomputing CHS would have fixed the problem:

1. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190121.044948.0f6116d3.en.html

Recent reports of other boot issues which do not seem to be the same issue:

1. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190328.021008.03aa2bc3.en.html
2. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190401.074103.bc76dd9e.en.html
3. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190419.203140.cd5d1b8a.en.html
4. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190522.061704.60c15ee0.en.html
5. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190523.135640.7f7eed6c.en.html

Unclear:

1. https://lists.autistici.org/message/20190327.004600.b5ca1460.en.html

Feature Branch: bugfix/16389-recompute-chs

Attachments

• gpt.diff
• gpt.img

Related issues

• Related to #16397 (closed)
• Related to #15987 (closed)
• Related to #16731 (closed)