Infrequent fail to boot. Upgrade BIOS to 3.07, now OS broken

Framework Laptop 13
1

My laptop shipped with the October batch, and I don’t recall what BIOS version it had. Sometime in the first couple of months I had two occurrences where i pressed the power button and after a few seconds realized it wasn’t doing anything. I then noticed the blink code on the side, but it was already half way through and I didn’t catch it. Upon powering on again, it booted without issue.
Today I went to boot my Framework laptop and the same thing happened, and again I missed most of the blink code. I got my camera out and put it on record and booted again and it went straight to the login page without issue.
I got on the forum here to post about the issue and was going to report which BIOS I was running and couldn’t recall. I knew I did an upgrade because I remember using a Windows PE to run the executable to update the BIOS since I’m running Ubuntu on my computer.
Anyway, hit F2, see I’m running 3.06, and I notice that there’s an update for 3.07 and it addresses an issue I actually had occur.
So, I download 3.07, put it on my WinPE drive, boot, execute, update blah blah. Great. It’s now running 3.07, except now when I get past my drive decryption prompt I just get a black screen with a mouse.
Reboot. Get past drive decryption prompt, get a login prompt but no background image. Sign in, black screen with mouse.
Reboot. Get past drive decryption prompt, get a login prompt WITH a background image, sign in, and now everything appears normal.

Question: Is there more I can do to troubleshoot the very intermittent failures to turn on?

2

Hi, unfortunately I’m not a Linux expert but I think I recall that updating the BIOS might break GRUB and require you reinstall/repair that from a live usb. You might try a forum search, I’m sure there were threads on how it should be done.

1 Like
4

how interesting RandomUser. I have a WD_BLACK SN750.
I will figure out how to get it attached to a windows system with the software installed and see about a firmware update.

5

We aren’t aware of any known issues on SN750, but definitely let us know if the failures to boot occur with 3.07. Could you also share which version of Ubuntu you are using?

6

just upgraded the firmware on the SN750 to current (moved it to a Windows box for install).
Booted back on my Framework to Ubuntu Budgie.
Was on 21.04 until today, upgraded to 21.10.
Kernel: 5.13.19-051319-generic (what I’ve been running for a couple months).

I should say I’m a fairly infrequent user of the laptop compared to my desktop. But when I want to use it, I usually just grab it, boot it, accomplish whatever task, and then shut it down.