How do I lay an image on the internal SSD on a new computer if the OS is corrupted? I can use both Network PXE (from Kace K2000) or External USB (using Dell ImageAssist) but neither of those options are now available.
Even if I have a UEFI built image I have no way to deliver that image on to the new computer with the UEFI or this Legacy External Devices option.
That's not correct. The removal of Legacy Boot support for the internal drive does not remove the ability to boot via PXE or USB, even in Legacy mode. If you have an image deployment environment that allows you to boot in Legacy mode and still lay down a UEFI-compatible image onto the internal drive, then you're fine. If not, you'll need to make sure you can boot from USB or PXE in UEFI mode. The system supports both mechanisms (although PXE in UEFI mode requires enabling the UEFI Networking Stack option, as mentioned above), and then of course you have to make sure your PXE server has a UEFI-compatible boot image to provide to clients and/or that your USB drive is set up to support UEFI booting, which means using FAT32 rather than NTFS. And then of course no matter how you boot, the image you're laying down needs to be set up for UEFI booting.
Hi jphughan, when you say "If you have an image deployment environment that allows you to boot in Legacy mode and still lay down a UEFI-compatible image onto the internal drive, then you're fine.", I assume you refer to be able to access the internal hard drive when you legacy-boot from an external USB pendrive or something.
What I see is that there is only the option to Legacy Boot from External Drives, which allows you to boot from an USB pendrive, but WITHOUT being able to access the internal HDD anyhow.
In this sense, all the possibility to fix disk errors or to access it without booting it vanishes, unless (probably - haven't tried it) you physically unmount the HDD, connect it via a sata-usb cable to the PC while booting from another pendrive.
Is this a true scenario or do you confirm you can boot from a pendrive and still being able to access the HDD?
The latter could be VERY useful in order to manage full hdd images to restore from a backup, for example, but let's stick to my question, please.
Thanks.
[UPDATE]: I've seen that the internal HDD is seen when you boot from USB, but the crypted partition is not visible. This is another story, related to BitLocker encryption.
We got bit by this too. We have two old and expensive pieces of equipment that require legacy OS support for their control software. I managed to automate the booting like so:
1) In the BIOS set it to only boot the legacy OS from USB Storage. (enable legacy options ROM, etc, etc)
2) Use Rufus (I used 3.1.1320) to create a fresh USB bootable disk with FreeDOS and the following options - Partition Scheme MBR, "Use Rufus MBR with BIOS ID 0x80", "Add fixes for old BIOSes". ***
3) What this will do is boot off of the USB drive, and present you with a "Press any key to boot from USB.." prompt. If you ignore this, it will boot the legacy OS from the internal HDD.
--
*** This is a good enough solution as long as nobody accidentally presses a key during boot-up. If you want to, you can go a bit further and fix that. Since Rufus is open source (yay!), you can patch out the above prompt (in the file /res/mbr/mbr.S). Now compile the new MBR, and convert the mbr binary blob into a character array (xxd -i mbr.bin under linux). Stick the first 440 bytes into mbr_rufus.h.Recompile the rufus project and use the fresh binary to perform the steps in #2. Now when you power on the laptop you will directly boot into the OS without any prompt.
One other thing that I ended up doing was using a "low profile" USB drive (Sandisk Cruizer Fit) and just taping it to the USB port so nobody accidentally removes the drive. I also disabled the USB port so that the drive doesn't even show up in Windows.
I would like to have the option to boot in legacy mode from internal drives, too. I do not understand why such useful functionality would be intentionally omitted. Apart from everything else, the UEFI mode is clunky and forces me to have an unencrypted FAT32 partition at the beginning of my disk to hold the bootloader, which is an obvious security issue.
in fairness to Dell, I don't recall Dell ever giving their customers warning about things like this. I've bought Dell products before and I never received an email saying, "The following upcoming laptops will not support Windows 7", for example, nor am I aware of other vendors doing something like that. Did you not purchase one or perhaps a handful of units to test this model in your environment before purchasing deployment-level quantities?
Hi
I disagree with this statement. I think that if Dell is removing expected basic PC functionality - as Intel did with their latest CPUs, there should be as much information issued to corporate customers via campaigns, highlighted in tech docs, info distributed to acc mgrs etc. etc. We have over 120,000 Dell devices. Enterprise customers keep these customer afloat.
The LEAST they can do is let us know they are removing a feature you would expect from a laptop and explain why that is, offering us the opportunity to procure devices that meet our requirements, or move to another vendor.
This failure to notify smacks of damage limitation to me. They didn't want to tell people as it would harm them and reduce revenue.
It's not just their latest line of laptops, it's also their desktops as well. These computers support Operating Systems that are not yet UEFI compatible just fine, as long as they are booted off an external device (like a USB stick, probably a DVD drive but I never tested that). However, you cannot boot such an OS from an internal drive.
We've started testing PCs with the same CPUs from other vendors and some of them still support booting these OS from an internal drive just fine. So Dell can't claim that it's a problem with the CPUs.
I too am not ready to roll out Windows 10 since we are a small company and everything runs just fine on Windows 7. I was skeptical to buy the Latitude 5490, but had to since the 5480 was EOL, very quickly I might add. In the past you could have a generation of laptop, looking at you E6440, for years and be able to buy it. Once Dell went away from the E series of laptops, its been a battle to get Windows 7 on them. I've had to run a special script on the 7th generation of Intel CPUs in the 5480 just to get Windows Update not to block it, simply because of the CPU generation. I was able to load Windows 7 onto the 5490 using my 5480 USB thumb drive [drivers injected directly]. The hardware is VERY similar between the 5480 and the 5490, but the BIOS simply will not allow the Windows 7 to boot. I could see the Windows 10 partitions in the Windows 7 setup, blew them away as normal and Windows 7 installed. Its a shame that Dell, along with Intel, are FORCING us to upgrade to Windows 10. Is the spying on We the People THAT important. Because that is what it comes down to. It's not about security, it's not about having the "latest" its about spying on the People. I know this may seem like a foreign concept to most that read this, but educate yourself. Why was M$ giving away Windows 10, why were they tricking People into upgrading via Windows Update? Open thy eyes...
I know it's a late reply but i have ran into the same problem recently. If you are running Linux, a workaround would be to put /boot and grub on a microsd card or external device and boot from there. For another OS i have no idea.
Hi, we have bought a bunch of the 7390 laptops. We are using FOG for installing images on the laptops and if I set them to boot in legacy mod and boot on the network card they will boot and I can install the image on the internal nVME disk. I can also boot after that on the network card and in the FOG menu choose to boot on the internal disk - and it will boot. If I unplug the network cable I cannot boot on the internal nVME disk anymore. We are using Windows 10 so it is not a question if the OS is old or not. Dell have just for some reason disabled direct boot from disk in legacy mode. Perhaps we can plugin a small USB or SD to fake a FOG boot and start the boot sequence on the internal disk.
Crappy but workable work around. I use pxelinux at work to boot clonezilla. I have used it to boot DOS off a local disk. I am thinking of a small USB disk that I can install linux on and use grub to boot the legacy OS's.
I have a Precision 3630 that I am using this on but it has those crappy legacy on external only limitations.
jphughan
9 Legend
9 Legend
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14K Posts
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June 21st, 2018 22:00
That's not correct. The removal of Legacy Boot support for the internal drive does not remove the ability to boot via PXE or USB, even in Legacy mode. If you have an image deployment environment that allows you to boot in Legacy mode and still lay down a UEFI-compatible image onto the internal drive, then you're fine. If not, you'll need to make sure you can boot from USB or PXE in UEFI mode. The system supports both mechanisms (although PXE in UEFI mode requires enabling the UEFI Networking Stack option, as mentioned above), and then of course you have to make sure your PXE server has a UEFI-compatible boot image to provide to clients and/or that your USB drive is set up to support UEFI booting, which means using FAT32 rather than NTFS. And then of course no matter how you boot, the image you're laying down needs to be set up for UEFI booting.
mditexts
1 Message
0
June 22nd, 2018 07:00
Hi jphughan,
when you say "If you have an image deployment environment that allows you to boot in Legacy mode and still lay down a UEFI-compatible image onto the internal drive, then you're fine.", I assume you refer to be able to access the internal hard drive when you legacy-boot from an external USB pendrive or something.
What I see is that there is only the option to Legacy Boot from External Drives, which allows you to boot from an USB pendrive, but WITHOUT being able to access the internal HDD anyhow.
In this sense, all the possibility to fix disk errors or to access it without booting it vanishes, unless (probably - haven't tried it) you physically unmount the HDD, connect it via a sata-usb cable to the PC while booting from another pendrive.
Is this a true scenario or do you confirm you can boot from a pendrive and still being able to access the HDD?
The latter could be VERY useful in order to manage full hdd images to restore from a backup, for example, but let's stick to my question, please.
Thanks.
[UPDATE]: I've seen that the internal HDD is seen when you boot from USB, but the crypted partition is not visible. This is another story, related to BitLocker encryption.
Kapil K
1 Message
0
July 5th, 2018 14:00
We got bit by this too. We have two old and expensive pieces of equipment that require legacy OS support for their control software. I managed to automate the booting like so:
1) In the BIOS set it to only boot the legacy OS from USB Storage. (enable legacy options ROM, etc, etc)
2) Use Rufus (I used 3.1.1320) to create a fresh USB bootable disk with FreeDOS and the following options - Partition Scheme MBR, "Use Rufus MBR with BIOS ID 0x80", "Add fixes for old BIOSes". ***
3) What this will do is boot off of the USB drive, and present you with a "Press any key to boot from USB.." prompt. If you ignore this, it will boot the legacy OS from the internal HDD.
--
*** This is a good enough solution as long as nobody accidentally presses a key during boot-up. If you want to, you can go a bit further and fix that. Since Rufus is open source (yay!), you can patch out the above prompt (in the file /res/mbr/mbr.S). Now compile the new MBR, and convert the mbr binary blob into a character array (xxd -i mbr.bin under linux). Stick the first 440 bytes into mbr_rufus.h.Recompile the rufus project and use the fresh binary to perform the steps in #2. Now when you power on the laptop you will directly boot into the OS without any prompt.
One other thing that I ended up doing was using a "low profile" USB drive (Sandisk Cruizer Fit) and just taping it to the USB port so nobody accidentally removes the drive. I also disabled the USB port so that the drive doesn't even show up in Windows.
Hope this helps someone..
-Kapil K
jmkzperez
3 Posts
0
September 19th, 2018 11:00
Boot is fine but we need ideas on how to re-image to that drive. How did they get Windows 10 for Workshop on the drive?
jmkzperez
3 Posts
0
September 19th, 2018 12:00
My colleague has figured out how to re-image the computer and these are her findings! .
Hey guys,
Here are the exact settings I used on RUFUS. Remember it can be NO BIGGER than 16gb. Why this matters?
I do not know,
but it was the only thing that worked for the surface pros.
I hope this helps,
bobfastner
2 Posts
0
September 24th, 2018 13:00
Add me to the WE.
Cantor dust
4 Posts
0
October 16th, 2018 21:00
I would like to have the option to boot in legacy mode from internal drives, too. I do not understand why such useful functionality would be intentionally omitted. Apart from everything else, the UEFI mode is clunky and forces me to have an unencrypted FAT32 partition at the beginning of my disk to hold the bootloader, which is an obvious security issue.
MikhailCompo
1 Rookie
1 Rookie
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14 Posts
0
November 1st, 2018 05:00
Hi
I disagree with this statement. I think that if Dell is removing expected basic PC functionality - as Intel did with their latest CPUs, there should be as much information issued to corporate customers via campaigns, highlighted in tech docs, info distributed to acc mgrs etc. etc. We have over 120,000 Dell devices. Enterprise customers keep these customer afloat.
The LEAST they can do is let us know they are removing a feature you would expect from a laptop and explain why that is, offering us the opportunity to procure devices that meet our requirements, or move to another vendor.
This failure to notify smacks of damage limitation to me. They didn't want to tell people as it would harm them and reduce revenue.
MikhailCompo
1 Rookie
1 Rookie
•
14 Posts
0
November 1st, 2018 05:00
Just to clarify exactly what this is.
Dell's latest line of Latitude laptops do not support ANY Operating Systems that are not yet UEFI compatible.
This is a significant omission to the tech details, and means these machines are not suitable for a lot of customers for a number of scenarios.
legacy_boot
1 Rookie
1 Rookie
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17 Posts
1
November 1st, 2018 06:00
It's not just their latest line of laptops, it's also their desktops as well. These computers support Operating Systems that are not yet UEFI compatible just fine, as long as they are booted off an external device (like a USB stick, probably a DVD drive but I never tested that). However, you cannot boot such an OS from an internal drive.
We've started testing PCs with the same CPUs from other vendors and some of them still support booting these OS from an internal drive just fine. So Dell can't claim that it's a problem with the CPUs.
robgile
3 Posts
0
November 2nd, 2018 16:00
o11076709
1 Message
0
February 5th, 2019 03:00
I know it's a late reply but i have ran into the same problem recently. If you are running Linux, a workaround would be to put /boot and grub on a microsd card or external device and boot from there. For another OS i have no idea.
Dell should reconsider this setting though.
PelleH
1 Message
0
February 14th, 2019 07:00
PenguinJeff
1 Message
0
February 22nd, 2019 15:00
Crappy but workable work around. I use pxelinux at work to boot clonezilla. I have used it to boot DOS off a local disk. I am thinking of a small USB disk that I can install linux on and use grub to boot the legacy OS's.
I have a Precision 3630 that I am using this on but it has those crappy legacy on external only limitations.