Truecrypt booting error

[TheLibrarian]

Interesting idea TheLibrarian, and in fact you're right! I wish I'd thought of that.

Heh, I didn't think of it, I found it by accident.

[Potato-Peeler]

i did contact stone, and they sent me a bios update. Didn't work, and they say its not their problem. Any ideas anyone?

[pete]

If you use another full disk encryption product, do you get the same issue on the stone hardware?

[Nostromoo]

That's all I got from them as well. The only solution I've found would be to use a 3rd party CD boot loader. Either the Windows XP CD trick, or perhaps a custom grub/lilo based one that is just configured solely to chain the MBR on the hard disk i.e. the CD calls the MBR rather than the BIOS calling it directly.

I'm convinced it's a bug in the BIOS on this model. Either it checksums the MBR and will only boot a vanilla XP one, or it simply objects to the additional data being stored in track zero, or a combination of both. But as Stone cannot do anything themselves, and the "manufacturer" (whoever that is) is allegedly unwilling to fix the BIOS (due it's age), even if they did know what the problem was, I see no other avenues open.

It's a real pain. I hope the green top laptops and the more recent Rock models don't also have the same issues. I was hoping to test them later when I have more time. Although if they do have problem, as they are more recent it might mean it can be fixed.

Although it's clunky, the CD trick does seem to work quite well.

[Potato-Peeler]

The Rock laptops truecrypt fine, not a problem with them, though they do still struggle to fog im afraid
So is everyone convinced this is a fault of stones bios then?

[nick2114]

The Rock laptops truecrypt fine, not a problem with them, though they do still struggle to fog im afraid
So is everyone convinced this is a fault of stones bios then?

Hi there

Yes the fault is definatly the BIOS of the MR-052 the machine itself is actually a Clevo product and stone have been in contact with clevo regarding this clevo will not give stone a newer bios for this! However i feel Clevo need to address this issue as it also stops the laptops running windows 7 as the bootloader is again unable to be called from BIOS I would urge everyone with this product to push stone to come up with a solution, Pushing Clevo for the rights to edit the BIOS. This laptop is now virtually useless, unless you want to run a vanilla XP build with no encryption and no ability to upgrade