Hi, [email protected] wrote: > Ouch.
Habits of proprietary software. They decide what's on your USB stick. Not because of malice but because of sound economic interest (at our expense, usually). > Is there any more systematic account for that? > Or a list of bad firmwares? https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1056998 reveiled that Lenovo's EFI and Microsoft's Windows operating system placed files into the EFI partition's filesystem. There is no indication that these files hamper booting or using the Debian ISO on the USB stick. > A way to find out (post mortem, perhaps?) In case that the overall checksum of the image on USB stick does not match, you need to compare image file and USB stick content. In order to verify that it's not a manipulation outside the EFI partition, consider to do something like this: Ask a partition editor or xorriso for the partition table of the image. Identify the block range of the EFI partition. Compute the checksum for the range from block 0 up to the start of the EFI partition. Compute the checksum for the range from first block after the EFI partition up to the image file end. Do the same two checksum computations with the USB stick base device (e.g. /dev/sdc) and compare the results. If these checksums match, then the alteration is only in the EFI partition. The filesystem of the EFI partitions can be inspected by mounting the partition range in the original image with -o ro,offset=$byte_offset . Like (with 4128 * 512 = 2113536): mount -o ro,offset=2113536 debian-13.1.0-amd64-netinst.iso /mnt/fat1 and by mounting the partition on the USB stick. Like mount -o ro /dev/sdc2 /mnt/fat2 Then find the difference. Your mileage may vary. Have a nice day :) Thomas
