Question toshiba old laptop no boot usb no boot hdd

[sasa2025]

Hello,

I am first time at this forum, I hope I don't use wrong section of forum, my friend has problem with toshiba laptop and I have problem usb linux boot on my laptop.

1. toshiba: my friend bought some old toshiba laptop and he needed help to boot from usb to install debian and windows 10. I tried to explain him to make boot order and although bios boot order is 1. USB memory and 2. USB ODD and after that 3. HDD, we had no chance to boot from usb flash device. old windows in HDD is also not booting. we get only black screen and it is written toshiba and it is repeating wihout boot from usb or hdd.

we tried in bios to change virtualization, disable/enable, legacy emulator doesn't have enable/disable than always and cold boot, we tried both but no success.
there is no bios option to update bios than youtube videos says inside of windows people should search service station and use it to update bios. but my friend can not boot windows and use service station, he is far away from capital city, he is living in some village, he can not visit service shop and possibly it would cost him more than laptop.

I asked him what is model of toshiba to ask toshiba for help but bios has no information about model, only bios version 7.90 and cpu i5 6200 2.4GHz
and toshiba website says they don't help than consumers should ask dynabook and dynabook has no section for europe support and they just write ask microsoft or tomshardware for support. catastropha how they make business.

do you have any suggestion what should we do when boot order is correct but boot from usb and even hdd is not working, we just get toshiba on the screen.

2. I have kali linux usb with encrypted persistance many months and I used it without problem, update, upgrade, install, etc, in my new asus laptop, but yesterday I lost taskbar and then desktop and then I got black screen. when I tried to restart I got black screen with squashfs error not possible to read some block. so, I thought hard disk inside of flash usb is dead and I tried to plugin it in old laptop I have, when I used usb ubuntu 18 I could not come inside of broken usb kali, it is not possible to mount encrypted persistance, but when I started ubutnu 18 from hard disk in old laptop, I succeeded to come inside of encrypted usb kali and copy all important files to hdd of old laptop. so, I made backup of my files in the case usb kali can not be repaired and I must buy new one.
does anybody knows what should I do and what kind of error is squashfs? I think when I installed live usb kali linux, it created squashfs and later persistance partition to be able to keep and update and change files. it means if squashfs is dead, I must reinstall live usb partition 4GB of usb kali and I don't know if persistance partition 220GB will be deleted, gone, or I will save persistance partition with many files? in theory I could use ubuntu old laptop to use terminal and follow tutorial from kali how to install live usb kali, but I don't know if it will delete my persistance partition 220GB I have 114GB files in this partition but as I said, I made copy of it to my old laptop HDD. if I don't repair usb flash device I will not loose my files 114GB.

 

[sasa2025]

update is not possible, forum think my post is spam. I checked usb device from ubuntu with fsck command and it is written bad magic number in superblock.

 

[sasa2025]

for newbies who can get the same problem: solution is to make new linux baby, to buy new usb flash device, when you use usb device long time and it is written many times, it gets damaged and even if you reinstall/reimage Kali it can get problem again because it is already damaged. I ordered one usb device today for 35 euro, 1000MB/s reading speed and 900MB/s writing speed, kingston max 256GB. such usb cost more than 70 euro.
Here is what i tried before decision to make funeral for present SP MS 60 250GB usb flash kali linux:

So, first error before loosing desktop and getting black screen, I saw beside bluetooth icon:
/usr/share/kali-themes/xfce4-panel-genmon-vpnip.sh: input/output error
but it is not about one bad sh script, this shows that error is happening because of bad usb flash device.

Fixing the Black Screen
This is typically caused by graphics driver conflicts. During boot:
At the GRUB menu, select "Live system" and press e to edit boot parameters
In the linux line, add nouveau.modeset=0 before splash (for NVIDIA GPUs) or nomodeset (generic solution). For example:
... quiet nouveau.modeset=0 splash noeject ...
Press Ctrl+X or F10 to boot
This disables problematic graphics drivers and should resolve the black screen.

re-image kali live usb partition /dev/sdb1 with old laptop ubuntu 18 (user dell), after Kali iso download....
sudo fdisk -l # or sudo lsblk -f
The first partition (sdb1) is iso9660 on USB, which is a read-only filesystem, so I cannot directly write to it. To replace the SquashFS file on that partition, I need to re-create the USB with the Kali ISO.
This command will overwrite only the first partition sdb1=ISO9660, leaving sdb2=FAT32 and sdb3=luks untouched.
sudo dd if=/home/dell/Desktop/kali-linux.iso of=/dev/sdb1 bs=4M status=progress conv=fdatasync

if you think you can do it in windows 11 for example, you will see that win11 can see only fat32 sdb2 partition, you will not see sdb2 ext4 and sdb3 luks encrypted partitions and you can not use rufus or balenaEtcher to recreate kali usb flash device.

of course, after every try, I tried to reboot kali usb flash device and it failed... again I had problem with loosing dekstop....

checking second boot partition /dev/sdb2 fat32:
sudo lsblk -f
sudo fsck.vfat -n /dev/sdb2 # Check without repairing
if there is error, you can use repair command: sudo fsck.vfat -a /dev/sdb2

Then I tried to repair partition sdb3 (luks encrypted):
sudo fdisk -l
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdb3 my_usb2 # to open partition protected by password
sudo umount /dev/mapper/my_usb2 # e2fsck will not work with mounted partition
sudo e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/mapper/my_usb2
................
persistence was not cleanly unmounted, check forced.
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
..........persistence: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****
persistence: 702812/14958592 files (1.1% non-contiguous), 41340202/59809838 blocks

sudo fdisk -l
sudo e2fsck -ycfv /dev/mapper/my_usb2 # this is very slow, 17% after 30 minutes
-y Assume "yes" to all questions
-c Check for bad blocks and add them to the badblock list
-f Force checking even if filesystem is marked clean
-v Be verbose
..........checking for bad blocks (read only test)................
persistence: Updating bad block inode.
ext2fs_update_bb_inode: Ext2 file too big while updating bad block inode
persistence: ***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

rebooot aaand ..... after 2 minutes I lost desktop again and when i restarted laptop bios doesn't see usb flash device any more, I tried 3 different usb ports but bios think this usb flash device should get funeral and new linux baby should be plugged in in usb port....

this error (Ext2 file too big while updating bad block inode) is saying that there are so many bad blocks that it can not be placed in ext4 partition or something like that, so, I had two choices: re-imaging whole usb again from zero with kali iso and risking that damaged usb fail again in the future or second choice: buy new usb device with enough storage and minimum 100MB/s writing speed. Kali must be updated every several weeks and if you have slow writing speed, you will wait 30 minutes to update Kali.
So, I made a choice, my laptop has one c-type usb port + USB port 3.0 with 10GB speed and I can buy new usb flash device and I found good one kingston 900MB/s writing speed 256GB for 35 euro.

if you want faster USB device than 900MB/s, people in such case buy rather external Nvme SSD instead of USB flash device which cost 65 euro in china (2000 MB/s speed), Nvme SSD is faster than the fastest usb flash device and just a little more expensive...for such purpose you should also care do you have usb 2.0 ports in your laptop or C-type port that can give you fast port for fast SSD, most modern laptops have minimum one usb port 3.0 and c-type port, unfortunately manufacturers still give us port 2.0 instead of thunderbolt 5, they must spend hardware produced in history before million years which they keep in warehouses before they start to sell new hardware, therefore we must wait 2 years to buy modern laptop and 2 years more to get lower-normal price laptop with modern hardware that already exist but we can not get it until they sell what they produced before 100 years....