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.

Interesting idea TheLibrarian, and in fact you're right! I wish I'd thought of that. So we encrypt the disk in the Stone, rebooted, machine won't boot. We already knew it booted in another PC, but now we can also boot it in the Stone if chaining the MBR on the disk from the boot loader on the CD. Just need to make sure the boot order is correct and that the CD is always in the drive and the user doesn't press any key when booting. I think that proves the fault is in the BIOS of this model, although given my conversation with Stone this doesn't really help at all. As helpful as the engineer I spoke to was, his hands were pretty much tied - they cannot get support from the manufacturer and under the licensing agreement they would be unable to fix the BIOS themselves anyway. Still at least it gives me closure. I'll feed it back to Stone though, at least it can go in a knowledge base if they have such a thing.

Did you get anywhere with this issue? We are having the exact same issue (albeit using a different encryption solution, not truecrypt) on a Stone MR-052 laptop. I've spoken with Stone and basically there is nothing they can do. We both agree from the test results it sounds like either a bug or a problem with the BIOS code, but even if they knew what it was there is nothing the supplier will do and under the licensing terms Stone are not permitted to modify the BIOS themselves. Because all the MR-052 laptops tested thus far appear to have the same problem, they can't put it down to a hardware fault with a particular machine either to send an engineer. Especially as there are no error messages. The encryption itself has taken perfectly, and if we take the disk out of the Stone and put it in an Acer it boots without issue (although it complains about the hardware differences rather vociferously.) But in the Stone the disk is seemingly just ignored and the machine falls back to trying a PXE boot before giving up - as if no hard disk was present.