Bricked laptop; doesn't boot; cannot enter bios or boot selection

[GromBeestje]

I have a laptop that has been bricked.

Brand: Fujitsu
Model:  A532
Product No: FPC03459BK
Part No: CP578101

This is a friends laptop. He upgraded his ubuntu installation when the brick happened.

It seems there is an incorrect/corrupted bios/efivars configuration that prevents the laptop from entering the bios setup or boot menu.
The laptop beeps when F2 for BIOS serup or F12 for boot menu is pressed, but does not proceed to enter the BIOS setup.
It is stuck at displaying a boot menu, offering to boot ubuntu but  when selected, the same menu reapppears.

I have tried contacting Fujitsu, but as the warranty expired and they don't support Linux, they were of no help.

On the motherboard I've located three SPI flash chips. I'd figured if I desolder them, identify the one containing the offending efivars and blank it (after dumping the contents of course), it might recover operation. But before I start doing so, I'd like to ask advice from the community. Do you know of other things I might try prior to desoldering SPI flash, or which flash chip is the one I need, or even tools to work with their content?

[50ShadesOfDirt]

A beep code is possibly a good thing, as it usually indicates the exact problem, according to the model's documentation. You'll need to track down the vendor's repair info, either from the vendor, or from the internet, on how to interpret the laptop model's beep codes, and what steps to take afterward.

I'd guess that ram is an issue, but could be other issues like cabling and such, inside the unit. If ram, open the laptop up according to vendor instructions, and reseat/clean or swap  the ram sticks around in the slots (unless it's soldered in).

Start with all the troubleshooting info from the vendor for that model, or from what you can harvest off the 'net ...

Beyond the above, research what others with this model of laptop have experienced and fixed.

Hope this helps ...

[audiotubes]

If you can't get to the BIOS this suggestion may not be helpful, but if you're lucky (and it has a CD drive) it may try to boot from that or USB first.

Try grabbing a "live CD" from Distrowatch or wherever you prefer and see if you can boot it. Feels like you may just have a borked bootloader setup, since it does offer to boot Ubuntu.

You might be able to reinstall grub if that's all there is, or if not, you can often fix anything besides hardware with a live CD.

[GromBeestje]

@50ShadesOfDirt: It ain't a beep code as-in a POST faillure. It's like a confirmation for the "Enter BIOS" or "Show Boot Selection". It does not beep when none or other keys are pressed.

@audiotubes It does not boot from external media, as the F12 key does not open the boot selection.  It is stuck at showing to boot "ubuntu", even when the hard disk is removed. Thus I would reason this comes from efivars.

[djsb]

Can you swap out the hard drive and install one that has been formatted and is blank? You can get adaptors that can plug into another PC, and then you plug your hard drive into the adaptor and format the drive from another PC. When you swap the hard drives, the BIOS should give a warning that there is no operating system found. Maybe the boot sector has been corrupted on the original hard drive. The boot sector either uses MBR or GPT. Worth a try.





PS Sometimes a bad CMOS backup battery can cause problems as the Drive parameters are stored in CMOS. The battery is used to keep this backed up. Is there a timer on the GRUB menu that times out?

[tunk]

Removing the bios battery for a few minutes, would that reset the bios to default values?

[Whales]

Everyone: please note this.  It's really important.

It is stuck at showing to boot "ubuntu", even when the hard disk is removed. Thus I would reason this comes from efivars.

I'd back tunk's suggestion.  Make sure to remove the normal battery and charger too as it might use those when the clock/bios battery is removed.  Also look for reset jumpers/pads/tactiles.

If you're really lucky then the firmware might check for a new update on a USB stick early in boot and auto-load it, but most implementations are more conservative than that and require booting into the BIOS config tool first

Don't discount the possibility of a built-in-disk somewhere.  Eg a few hundred MB of flash that is being used for the EFI fat32 partition.  Just to troll you provide corporate with features.

[Whales]

A few years back I succeeded at using UEFItool to navigate the contents of my laptop's BIOS after extracting it with a cheap SOIC chip programming clip and CH programmer.  Maybe there are some flags you could edit that would interrupt the boot process?  Not sure.

[darkspr1te]

Seems this is a known bug,
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=226363&start=20

My suggestion is the same Whales, that is dump the SPI flash from the device and either patch it with Pheonix tool or flash the 1.09 firmware (you will lose some items like windows serial if you do this direct route) or you could clear the EFI vars from the dump and reflash.

if you have a arduino around (3.3v) and a solder iron then this is quite easy to do

darkspr1te

[50ShadesOfDirt]

So, if not a beep code, then it sounds like this is a UEFI model of laptop, and the UEFI partition is hosed. I'd research on UEFI recovery steps for that model, to get it back to a known state (as shipped). Recovering it to a known state should knock out whatever it is that ubuntu hosed for the owner ...

I tend to not do UEFI if I can help it, so I don't have the steps at hand ... but they should be discoverable for that model of laptop. Perhaps something like:

  forum.ts.fujitsu.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=47905

Although you'll be searching for your exact model.

I can't imagine ubuntu hosing the flash bios, unless the owner was trying to do a separate flash bios (firmware) upgrade. If that was the case, then there should be some (gory) Fujitsu steps to recover the flash to a known factory-default state, even if something got hosed by a failed flash upgrade. I did have a failed Dell laptop flash upgrade, but there was a series of steps from Dell, spread across several support pages, one of which finally got me back to a good state.

For fujitsu A532 models, this was interesting reading, as there *was* ubuntu involved:

  bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/efibootmgr/+bug/1082418

Takes careful reading, but they point at other links & posts where there are steps to "short a pair of pads, and recover access to bios", and such.

Hope this helps ...

[GromBeestje]

Thanks for the suggestions so far. Sorry for the late reply. First week of work has been busy, and after a day of work I'm not much in the mood for more trouble shooting at home. I'll give you an update when I get to it.

[Whales]

Best of luck    Update us if you can.

[GromBeestje]

A link to blog article describing exactly the problem I am facing happened to appear on my Mastodon timeline.
I have been able to solve the problem without having to desolder anything. And if I were, I would have started with the wrong chip as it turned out.
The article in question is https://blog.timschumi.net/2024/01/20/ah532-bios-investigation.html

First thing is, the CMOS reset is located beneath the RAM. I wouldn't have found it without that blogpost.
The battery is impossible to remove without disassembling the whole thing. (Who designed it that way? When the battery runs out, replacing it is such a pain.)
Anyhow, I did try to connect the top of the battery to what I figured was a ground. That did not work. But with the information about the test pads beneath the battery to reset the CMOS, the CMOS was cleared.

This results in there being to EFI boot entries. As there is a /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI file present on the EFI partition on the hard disk, it will default to booting that. But entering BIOS or selecting an EFI file to  boot manually was still not available. The rest of it, as in the blog post linked. Ran the code they published to restore the BIOS setup / Select boot file, and all is well.

Please note, their laptop model is AH532, while mine was A532. On the Fujitsu, where one can download the BIOS update, it appears they offer the same BIOS for both. The BIOS version on this laptop was 1.10. The blog article mentions version 1.08 and 1.09, but it seems their solution works on 1.10 as well. The 1.10 version is also a bit odd, as it seems this BIOS is newer then what is offered to download on the Fujitsu website.

 

[Haenk]

This is why I always hated EFI, going back to Itanium days.
So much trouble and pain, for so little benefit.
(Yes yes, BIOS is cr*p too, but has yet to fail on me.)

[Whales]

I've had BIOSs that do weird things with booting from USB sticks, including:

* Only listing USB sticks as bootable medium if the last boot wasn't to a USB stick
* Not working with certain brands/types of USB stick
* Loading _stupidly_ slowly from some brands/types of USB stick, then fine once the OS loads its own drivers.

UEFI is a supserset of traditional BIOS, therefore it can only add more sources of problems.  Mine have included:

* UEFI-provided software auto-installing on every boot of windows even after you manually remove it
* Poweroff hangs (resolved by changing to BIOS-style boot)

I guess that list is shorter   But I don't think that's a fair and unbiased metric.