On Thu, Mar 05, 2026 at 09:31:16PM +0100, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > 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).
That's why we love them, right? Now, as they realised they can't stamp us out, they decided to colonize us (resp. our brains). I must admit, they seem to be succeeding :-( > > 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. Oh, thanks a million. > There is no indication that these files hamper booting or using the > Debian ISO on the USB stick. OK, so in "my" cases, the pilot error hypothesis is the most likely (as often). > > 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. [...] Thanks for the very detailed (as always) recipe. I'll keep it close to my heart and perhaps dry-run it before the next install party (these days, luckily, this kind of party seems to be taking off again!) Cheers -- t
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