invalid signatures

[Liam Proven]

On Thu, 14 May 2020 at 23:45, Charlie Luna <ircsurfer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Liam,
>
> It's Charlie. Using my gmail account to see if I can respond in the appropriate manner now.

:-)

> Update: I've tried everything I could to get my Asus laptop to recognize, and install from, my usb thumbdrive. Nothing worked.
>
> Switched to a backup, albeit older, laptop, and I can install whatever I want on it.
>
> Now, the difference being this: the older laptop has a HDD only. So I'm going to postulate that the m.2 SSD in my Asus laptop has an issue with encryption signatures for whatever reason and the exact same drive is $30 and I'll get a new one without any OSes on it and then install Ubuntu or another flavor.

That is _extremely_ strange. I've never heard of such a thing before
but I am not ruling it out! Linux exposes a ton of weird stuff and I
have seen things that People On The Internet have flatly told me is
_impossible._

UEFI in particular is an absolute minefield and there are a lot of
machines out there with UEFI firmware that does not play nice with
Linux.

So, actually, that's a thought -- another reason to try a firmware
update! As I said, 1 variant of your machine has 3.11 and another
3.10. I don't know which variant you have.

I don't imagine that an x.01 update will do much though. :-(

> So, at least now I know a little more. And I used the exact same thumbdrive and didn't get an invalid signature at all and was taken straight into the installation process.

As I somewhat suspected, this points to it _not_ being bad downloads
or bad signatures but something else weird going on.

> Weird, dude. I wish I knew more but looks like I'm getting me a new SSD now.

:-(

But, as you say, deeply weird.

> Now I just wonder how to force my Asus to load from the HDD only instead of the SSD because I can live with until I get a new m.2 SSD.

OK. Well. 2 possibilities here.

I used to have a huge 17" screen laptop, a Toshiba Satellite Pro P300.
2 × 2½" SATA hard disk bays.

The thing is, it only came with 1 disk and a spacer in the other bay:
a screw-down lid with legs, and no carrier in the bay. You couldn't
put anything in the bay with that lid on it, and I got the machine 2nd
hand with no way to get a replacement cover.

I sawed the legs off  the lid but it wasn't  the right shape to
support a drive, and I had no carrier to put the drive in or screw or
clip it into place.

If I put a hard disk  in the bay, when I picked up the laptop, the 2nd
hard disk moved and if I held it by that corner, the disk made a
horrible noise. :-(

So, I put an SSD in the 2nd bay, and put a bigger HD in the 1st bay.
But I wanted to boot off the SSD, so I changed the boot sequence in
the BIOS to boot off disk 2 first.

So it booted off the _second_ drive, loaded Linux or Win 7 off that,
and I kept the Windows & Linux data and swap partitions on the 1st
hard disk. This worked fine.

So you _might_ be able to do that. Leave Windows on the NVMe SSD, but
tell the PC to boot from the hard disk instead and put Linux on that?
It'll be slower, though. :-(

-- 
Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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