Tails 1.1 X60 report
Originally created by @ioerror on #7660 (Redmine)
I’ve heard that the X60 is not booting for some folks with Tails 1.1 and I wanted to record my upgrade adventure. I did not use the “clone and upgrade” method of installing. I have heard that this doesn’t work for some folks - if that is true - it would be great if they could leave comments on this ticket.
I installed Tails 1.1 from scratch and followed the following instructions:
https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/installation/manual/linux/index.en.html
isohybrid reports the following new message:
cp tails-i386-1.1.iso tails-i386-1.1.iso.hybrid
isohybrid tails-i386-1.1.iso.hybrid --entry 4 --type 0x1c
isohybrid: Warning: more than 1024 cylinders: 1049
isohybrid: Not all BIOSes will be able to boot this device
I installed the iso with dd as expected:
dd if=tails-i386-1.1.iso.hybrid of=/dev/sdc bs=16M
65+1 records in
65+1 records out
1099956224 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 388.826 s, 2.8 MB/s
This produces a bootable USB disk for an X60 with the IBM BIOS. As a side note - it also boots with the write protect (TrekStor with hardware ro/rw switch, 8GB USB disk) switched enabled on the IBM BIOS.
On an X60 with coreboot, I found a bug in Coreboot/SeaBIOS where the USB disk won’t be detected if the write switch is toggled to read only mode. However I found a work around for the SeaBIOS bug that allows me to boot the disk with the read only switch toggled. Essentially, one must boot with the switch in read/write mode, hit F12 for the SeaBIOS boot menu and before the USB disk is selected, toggle the switch to read only and select it for booting. It will now boot in read only mode. Ironically on a different TrekStore disk (also 8GB) isn’t always needed and sometimes, even with the write protect switch set to read only, it works. Not always but sometimes. It appears to differ based on USB disk which implies that the firmware inside the USB disk is probably different.
There was an annoying bug on the X60 where we’d have to fix the X server’s power management “feature” like so:
xset -dpms s off
That xset fix is no longer required on Tails 1.1 - hooray!
Automatic self-destruct upon USB disk removal works as expected.