Going into the BIOS, I tried disabling the quick/quiet boots and saw that it was restarting immediately after the memory check.
After a dozen attempts or so, I removed the boot drive (module in my case) and let the BIOS tell me there was no drive. Insert the drive and reboot. The machine then worked.
Today, the same boot loop, remove, replace, restart.
I’m not sure what happened in this latest firmware to start causing the boot loops, but if anyone is running into it - try removing your boot drive (be it module or nvme) and rebooting.
As a side note, when using testing, I’d recommend configuring your system to pull security updates from unstable. The Debian security team only upload security updates to stable and unstable, not to testing, and sometimes the package merge from unstable to testing is blocked for various reasons.
I’ve found that some packages sometimes disappear from testing, while waiting to make their way from unstable. I’ve had to manually download a few from stable to get a few things installed.
I have tried to update to BIOS 3.03 and it failed.
I downloaded the update and extracted it on a clean thumb drive formatted in Fat32.
After cleanly unmounting the drive, I made sure that Secure Boot was disabled.
I rebooted to the thumb drive and got this error:
I got no farther until I rebooted without the thumb drive, running normally with BIOS 3.02.
What’s the deal here? Any Fix? Any Goofs? Scratching my head on this.
But then, it was the first beta I guess :} So I think you don’t have to enable the lvfs-testing as it is supposedly in official branch by now.
It downloads the bios and applies all with that.
I’m still unable to update the BIOS. I’ve tried it using a thumb drive and also through the terminal. Both ways send me into a GRUB rescue mode and go no further. I have made sure that Secure Boot is disabled. The message I get is:
Something appears wrong with you Debian install. I believe you should be able to use a Ubuntu 24.04 live image to kick off the update while you get your Debian problem fixed.
Well, I decided to start completely over. Now, to be completely honest, I have absolutely no idea how to do the update. I have been winging it. I need help big time to get this done. I am installing Ubuntu 24.04 so I can get the BIOS update. Once I get the update completed, I want to install LMDE6 and then the amdgpu workaround.
Step-by-step detailed instructions would be greatly appreciated on this. This is what I feel like right now.
I don’t mean to be rude so apologies if it comes off that way.
If you’re not familiar enough to debug problems in Debian I would say you’re probably better off using the “easier” distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.
If you don’t like snaps in Ubuntu, remove them and install flatpaks. If you don’t like GNOME, install plasma.
I personally haven’t given plasma an honest try until very recently and I like it a lot more than I expected. I certainly prefer the number of knobs that they offer compared to GNOME.
It’s not that I don’t know how to debug Debian. I don’t know how to debug - period. I don’t like Fedora or Ubuntu. I like Mint; however, I like the Debian edition better than Ubuntu. I have had horrible experiences with Ubuntu.
Now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way, are you willing to help me? Or do you need to bow out and let someone else who is more willing to jump in?
I’m sorry if I seem short. I’m short on time right now. I have to leave early in the morning for a long drive to attend a funeral.
I’m willing to try to help you, I just want to warn you Debian can be challenging. The fact that they move SO slow means you run into bugs fixed in other distros long before.
Once you get reinstalled you’ll need to install the updated GPU firmware to start and then you can go from there to see what the next thing broken is.
I understand. As for the GPU update, I already have it ready to go, I just want to do that right.
I’ve been running LMDE 6 on my desktop for a while now. I was using Windows on a dying laptop until I got my FW laptop. As a guy that has been using computers for most of my life, it’s crazy that I have never had to do a BIOS update.
Well, running computers for 35 years. Before that, I was outside running around and doing mad things as a kid and teenager
The Distro I had the least issues is KDE Neon. It is using Ubuntu 22.04, with the latest drivers and latest KDE Plasma and I by default remove snap/snapd. Enabling the HWE kernel, and almost all problems are gone (Well, only one left - switching automatically to external screen when using a Dell Dock. But this is probably due to the 6.5 kernel I am using).
@Mark_E_Jeffries if you have a day or two to commit to it and are interested in learning a bit more about the components of a Linux system you may find it beneficial to go through the manual install of a distro like Arch. I was running Mint myself, but I wanted to know more about what was going on so I installed Arch on a spare drive. Getting that system running taught me more about the core components than the 10ish years I’d been using linux off and on as a Windows alternative.
Coincidentally, I found I also liked that distro, and so now it’s my main OS, but that doesn’t have to be the goal. I’ll also note I was able to install the bios update using my Arch install.
The easiest way to upgrade is copy the firmware files onto a USB flash drive, and boot from that. Use the BIOS option “Boot from file” to find the file to boot from.
In the upgrade notes, it mentions that the upgrade will fail if the battery is 100%.
To get round this, I went into the BIOS and set the max battery setting to 80%, used my laptop without external power for a bit, got the percentage down to 90% and then plugged it back in again, and then tried the firmware update.
For those of us who may have missed it. Where is this located? Is this a new GPU firmware update that just came out? Skimmed the OP just in case but don’t see it
as a kid and teenager 