Tails

#1 Updated by sajolida 2013-12-06 01:12:41

If I understand correctly, this plan should also correct some weird behavior that are sometimes experienced while starting Tails with several Tails devices plugged in (DVD + USB, or 2 USB). If not, then this might be worth being taken into consideration.

#2 Updated by intrigeri 2013-12-06 01:27:45

> If I understand correctly, this plan should also correct some weird behavior that are
> sometimes experienced while starting Tails with several Tails
> devices plugged in

This is correct.

#6 Updated by intrigeri 2014-06-28 14:13:10

Is it possible for something running in the initramfs to know for sure what filesystem the initramfs was loaded from (by the bootloader)? If it is, then we don’t need the bootloader to provide us this information in any way.

#13 Updated by BitingBird 2014-06-30 23:38:41

When done, the “known issues” page should be updated to remove all the sandisk sticks, and possibly others :)

#17 Updated by sajolida 2014-07-31 11:46:41

Already two people reported that newer SanDisk might have a different firmware that fixes this issue. But that still need confirmation.

After this, and as SanDisk was the main (if not only) vendor with that behavior, maybe this ticket can be set as low priority or closed…

#18 Updated by intrigeri 2014-08-01 15:07:16

> After this, and as SanDisk was the main (if not only) vendor with that behavior,
> maybe this ticket can be set as low priority or closed…

Agreed. Let’s see what happens :)

#19 Updated by sajolida 2014-08-02 13:34:03

Confirmed, some new SanDisk USB sticks are advertised again as removable:

/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.2/usb1/1-1/1-1:1.0/host2/target2:0:0/2:0:0:0/block/sda/removable
1

#20 Updated by emmapeel 2014-10-20 10:31:16

New user report indicates that SanDisk Extreme 3.0 without the Windows 8 logo, just bought, has removable flag off…

#21 Updated by sajolida 2014-10-20 17:38:23

Actually, this report says that the removable flag is set to “0”
(unset). We want the devices to be announced as removable.

#23 Updated by sajolida 2014-11-11 11:20:38

Yes, definitely.

Still we got one report from someone who bought a new SanDisk without
the Windows 8 certificate and that wasn’t flagged as removable. We check
this in /sys/devices and all.

Maybe this stick was a mislabeled from factory…

#25 Updated by sajolida 2014-11-16 11:17:18

I bought a SanDisk the other day. I was marked as “Software Compatibility: Windows 7, Windows 8” but it didn’t have a Windows 8 logo or certification badge on it. Still it was correctly flagged as removable and boots fine.

#26 Updated by emmapeel 2014-12-14 20:22:40

Today a user reported not being able to boot unless removing the line “live-media=removable” at boot, though maybe External Hard Drives are unsupported. It happenned with a Western Digital Elements USB 3.0 External HDD.

#27 Updated by sajolida 2014-12-16 13:37:55

Emma: I think that this is expected for external hard disk.

#28 Updated by goupille 2015-01-10 19:47:25

maybe that’s a bad news, but we have a report that this issue is also affecting SD-Cards, at least the Sony SDHC 8 GB (Type: SF-8UY/T1)

#29 Updated by BitingBird 2015-01-11 00:33:10

goupille: this should be documented in Known issues, do you care to open a ticket ?

#30 Updated by intrigeri 2015-01-11 09:38:31

> goupille: this should be documented in Known issues, do you care to open a ticket ?

Note that this might be caused to the SD Card reader, rather than to the SD Card itself.

#31 Updated by WhiteWind 2015-01-13 23:42:51

Hello. Just wanted to say, I got a bought-new Sandisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 thumb drive (SDCZ80-064G-G46), there is no Windows 8 logo on the box, and I can’t boot from it. BUT that is currently only my first try with something different than Windows, so that could be something else I’ve not done/ I did wrong, on my end. I have followed the instructions given on Tails mainsite, SecureBoot is disabled and the thumb drive is set as the boot drive in the UEFI. When I boot on it, I have a black screen with “No configuration file found. Boot: ”. I would try the live-media= thing, but I’m not too confident, and well I don’t really understand how it is done.

#32 Updated by intrigeri 2015-01-14 09:33:11

redmine@labs.riseup.net wrote (13 Jan 2015 23:42:52 GMT) :
> Hello. Just wanted to say, I got a bought-new Sandisk Extreme 64GB USB 3.0 thumb drive (SDCZ80-064G-G46), there is no Windows 8 logo on the box, and I can’t boot from it.

Please report a bug, including the answers to all questions on https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/bug_reporting/tails_does_not_start/. Thanks!

#33 Updated by sajolida 2015-01-14 09:48:46

The live-media= parameter has to be entered on the boot screen, see:

https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/startup_options#index1h1

So if you don’t get to the boot screen, then I think that you are facing
a different issue. Feel free to contact our support team for more help.

#34 Updated by emmapeel 2015-03-13 08:36:01

New user reports problems with a brand new SanDisk Extreme USB3.0 stick with no Win8 logo.

User needed to remove the boot option to be able to boot.

#35 Updated by BitingBird 2015-03-13 13:12:59

I sent a patch to add SanDisk Extreme and Sony SD Card to the known issues. Further unsupported devices should get a dedicated doc ticket, instead of cluttering this one, which is about the code to solve the issue :)

#36 Updated by BitingBird 2015-03-14 12:57:03

goupille: regarding the SD Card, could you ask this person to run the following command:

sudo find /sys/devices -path “*sd*/removable” -print -exec cat ‘{}’ \;

This returns the status of the removable flag on the device.

#37 Updated by sajolida 2015-03-15 15:56:45

Frontdesk people, please make sure to submit patches to add the relevant hardware on the known issues page. This is definitely on your plate as stated in https://tails.boum.org/contribute/working_together/roles/front_desk.

Also, please make sure to have people run that find command before adding hardware. It’s in the frontdesk repo. As you surely know, people do all kind of crazy stuff to get Tails to run and report them in very funny ways sometimes…

#38 Updated by intrigeri 2015-03-16 22:45:05

It’s getting hard to find the relevant information in here, so let’s make things clear.

Frontdesk people: it’s useful to report general tendencies (or even stats), as I asked on Feature #6397#note-22: this will help us decide how urgent this problem is. (Looking at the history of the known issues section about it may actually be enough to assert its impact, as long as you keep it updated.)

However, this ticket is not about compiling a list of individual devices that can’t boot with live-media=removable, nor about updating the known issues page (there are better places for that anyway). It’s about fixing this problem for good.

Please, let’s stop adding to the (already big) pile of comments anything that doesn’t help fixing the underlying problem. Thanks!

#42 Updated by intrigeri 2017-04-11 14:53:20

https://sources.open-infrastructure.net/software/system-boot/commit/?id=c6de5da6c4b3e6744cc05601930508472de54549 makes system-boot (a live-boot fork) ignore the “removable” bit, and instead use heuristics based on the bus that’s used (i.e. something relatively similar to what we do in Tails Installer and Tails Persistence Setup, where we treat all deviced plugged via USB or SDIO as OK). Might be good enough for us. I had rejected this idea on Feature #6641 but I think my reasons were too simplistic: as the aforementioned commit shows, there’s a sane way to do it. Now, this addresses the initial goal of this ticket, but it doesn’t address the UX issue one has when starting a computer with 2 Tails devices plugged in — however, Feature #7475#note-7 does, and can nicely combined with the solution described here.