I had this problem at work a week ago or so, at least with Fujitsu PCs. For them, the main cause isn’t an empty CMOS battery, but rather that Fujitsu generally had too little BIOS cache, since there is nothing about it in the UEFI standard. The update basically overfilled that cache, rendering the BIOS completely unusable. The POST doesn’t even go through fully.
The PC are sort of bricked, you gotta put the mainboard into recovery mode, put the ROM file on a freeBSD formatted stick and wait until you see instructions on the screen. Follow them, restart the PC. I recommend setting the BIOS to the optimized default settings, as not doing that might make the boot of Windows pretty slow in some cases. I did hear that it can delete the keys from the TPM, but I haven’t seen that with my PCs at work.
I learned one morning that a cmos battery could become a resistor. It can fail in a way that it’s not working nor completely dead but passes just enough current to make a server motherboard that otherwise might A: Work, B: detect it’s dead/missing and boot anyway with defaults to instead C: just freeze and not do anything. That was a fun full day of time wasted.
When I was 12, I thought I had broken the family computer trying to get Ultima III to run. I read every MS-DOS manual I could find trying to fix it before someone found me out. It was the frikin CMOS battery. I learned a lot of DOS that summer.
Wow what a super cool website without cookie opt-out.
Well the website (and the guy maintaing it) is pretty old. I think the blog posts reach back till Windows Vista. The guy itself wrote some books about Win95 so he has some experience.
The site is quite popular in Germany and the information is usually good summarized and helpful IMHO.
Anyway as always I recommend an adblocker when using the internet.
But how many civilians cannibalized?
deleted by creator
There are no civilians when profit is involved.
Is this for real?
Yes, multiple of our Windows laptops today couldn’t boot and displayed a BitLocker error message and all affected laptops somehow had an empty BIOS battery…
Can it at least be fixed with a new battery? Or does that get drained quickly too?
AFAIK a new battery + entering the Bitlocker recovery key fixed the problems.
Usually these batteries hold for years. I have a 15+ year old laptop where I had to replace the battery after ~10 years.
However the affected laptops are now a few years old, aren’t designed properly (I heard weird stuff happening like adding additional RAM somehow causes the display to fail) and somehow just have a CR2016 battery installed, not a bigger CR2032. And yes these are buisness-laptops designed for companies -.-
This feels like https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/unix_surrealism
Using the capital punishment symbol instead of the killed in action symbol suggests windows was executed after the war (likely by installing linux lol)
Does “Secure Boot” actually benefit the end user in any way what so ever? Genuine question
Well yes, assuming that:
- you trust the hardware manufacturer
- you can install your own keys (i.e. not locked by vendor)
- you secure your bios with a secure password
- you disable usb / network boot
With this you can make your laptop very tamper resistant. It will be basically impossible to tamper with the bootloader while the laptop is off. (e.g install keylogger to get disk-encryption password).
What they can do, is wipe the bios, which will remove your custom keys and will not boot your computer with secure boot enabled.
Something like a supply-side attack is still possible however. (e.g. tricking you into installing a malicious bootloader while the PC is booted)
Always use security in multiple layers, and to think about what you are securing yourself from.
For you? No. For most people? Nope, not even close.
However, it mitigates certain threat vectors both on Windows and Linux, especially when paired with a TPM and disk encryption. Basically, you can no longer (terms and conditions apply) physically unscrew the storage and inject malware and then pop it back in. Nor can you just read data off the drive.
The threat vector is basically ”our employees keep leaving their laptops unattended in public”.
(Does LUKS with a password mitigate most of this? Yes. But normal people can’t be trusted with passwords and need the TPM to do it for them. And that basically requires SecureBoot to do properly.)
That’s only one use of secure boot. It’s also supposed to prevent UEFI level rootkits, which is a much more important feature for most people.
True. Personally, I’m hoping for easier use of SecureBoot, TPM and encryption on Linux overall. People are complaining about BitLocker, but try doing the same on Linux. All the bits and pieces are there, but integrating everything and having it keep working through kernel upgrades isn’t fun at all.
It’s so secure that the first thing under Wikipedia’s entry for Secure boot is Secure boot criticism
Yes this is a real, I’m not joking.
It’s not the first thing, it’s in the middle.
under Wikipedia’s entry for Secure boot
What’s the first thing under the “Secure boot” section? The section that it automatically scrolls to when clicking my link?
Secure Boot
The UEFI specification defines a protocol known as Secure Boot, which…
…
UEFI shell
…
Classes
…
Boot stages
…
Usage
…
Application development
And finally
Criticism
Secure Boot
See also: Secure Boot criticism
It’s right there under the header
most competent Microsoft developer
