Installing an OS over the existing OS

[Phil]

On 25/2/23 01:50, Liam Proven wrote:

> I am merely curious, but can you be _specific_  about this bug? I

I had the Raspberry Pi desktop (Debian 11, Buster) installed but 
couldn't get past "loading initial ramdisk". I'd spent hours researching 
this and discovered that this was a symptom of the Intel microcode bug. 
I was not able to boot from a live OS to investigate the reason for the 
failure (optical drive is dead and couldn't boot from USB) so I gave up 
and instead installed Lubuntu, again on the same transplanted drive 
which, as I said, worked but was painfully slow. Indecently, I had 
installed the Raspberry Pi desktop on the same model Tosheba A100 (not 
the very same laptop) years ago using an external DVD drive. This wasn't 
the same Debian version, it was Debian 7 Stretch.

I think that researching the Intel micocode bug may have led me astray. 
Anyway here's an extract from ChatGPT's response.

"The Intel microcode bug you are referring to is likely the one that was 
discovered in early 2018. This bug affected many Intel processors, 
including some that were used in older laptop computers.

The microcode is a set of instructions that are stored in a processor's 
firmware, which helps the processor carry out certain operations. In 
this case, the bug was related to how the processor handled certain 
instructions related to speculative execution, a feature that improves 
processing performance by predicting likely future instructions and 
executing them in advance."

The fix was to downgrade to an earlier version of the microcode, but 
again that was not possible without being able to boot from USB or a DVD.

Now I've got a new problem. My new Thinkpad X131e intermittently loses 
blue, leaving the screen a reddish green colour.

-- 

Regards,
Phil