{"id":219,"date":"2012-07-13T00:44:27","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T05:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/?p=219"},"modified":"2012-07-13T00:46:59","modified_gmt":"2012-07-13T05:46:59","slug":"dell-optiplex-9010-uefi-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/2012\/07\/13\/dell-optiplex-9010-uefi-problem\/","title":{"rendered":"Dell OptiPlex 9010 UEFI Problem?"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you ready my previous post<\/a>, you already know that I’ve had frustrating issues with lock-ups in Ubuntu 12.04 on my new Dell OptiPlex 9010, and perhaps related oddities with errors reported in memtest86+. I opened a support ticket with Dell, and they shipped me a replacement system, which arrived today. The spoiler: it didn’t fix my problems. However, in the course of determining that fact, I may have further isolated the issue.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My memtest86+ runs were all turning up clean to start out, and I was getting uncharacteristically optimistic. I ran a couple times with the included RAM, then tweaked various BIOS settings, and had another clean run. I installed my 16 GiB of Crucial RAM, and ran a few more memtest86+ passes (from cold boot, with Ethernet connected) that turned up clean. Finally, I swapped the hard drive and SSD from the original system into the new machine, and was going to boot into the OS.<\/p>\n

Upon my first boot, though, I realized I needed to enable UEFI in the BIOS in order to boot into Ubuntu, since that’s how I’d installed. That came with the [un]fortunate realization that another variable had just simultaneously changed in my grand experiment, but I was off to run memtest86+ again. I was crushed to see the same errors appear upon that first run that had plagued my first system (~245 MiB). That did, at least, give me a grand idea for an additional experiment, though: I switched the BIOS back to the Legacy<\/q> setting (from UEFI), and re-ran memtest86+. Lo and behold, the errors went away. I ran it again from a cold boot to be sure, and the errors were still gone. I switched back to UEFI, and the errors came back.<\/p>\n

I don’t really understand all this, but I thought that UEFI being enabled in the BIOS shouldn’t really matter for memtest86+, since it’s not UEFI-enabled\/aware, as far as I know. In my mind, anyhow, this really points at a Dell BIOS\/UEFI bug. What do you think the chances are that they’ll acknowledge that and actually be able to fix it?<\/p>\n

Anyway…<\/h3>\n

Since that fix could take quite a while (maybe arrive approximately…never?), I still want to try to move forward. Armed with this new finding\/hypothesis, my current plan is to leave the system in Legacy<\/q> boot mode, replace my EFI partition with a bios_grub partition<\/a>, replace grub-efi with grub-pc, and see if the system is more stable like that.<\/p>\n

Any other thoughts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you ready my previous post, you already know that I’ve had frustrating issues with lock-ups in Ubuntu 12.04 on my new Dell OptiPlex 9010, and perhaps related oddities with errors reported in memtest86+. I opened a support ticket with Dell, and they shipped me a replacement system, which arrived today. The spoiler: it didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[27,17,18,28],"class_list":["post-219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical","tag-dell-optiplex-9010","tag-error","tag-linux","tag-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":222,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219\/revisions\/222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}