Slax does not boot for me on modern DELL equipment - EFI keys? image written with DD

[a name]

Slax does not boot for me on modern DELL equipment. 

In UEFI, 

I have enabled legacy boot, 

and turned secure boot off. 

OptiPlex 9020 (OptiPlex 9020)    circa approx 2014 model. 

Dell Latitude 7480     (Although I have read that things this modern require EFI signing keys and certificates, and I think I read you mentioned perhaps purchasing one from dirty M$ in your blog).

On the optiplex, pretty much any other distro installer will boot just fine from USB. 

I've tried writing the USB image via dd :

     sudo dd if=/path/NAME_of_.iso of=/dev/TARGET bs=1024k status=progress

And also with no block size specified 

      sudo dd if=/path/NAME_of_.iso of=/dev/TARGET status=progress 

On boot, I think the screen says something along the lines of 

"Boot device not found. Press any key to retry" 

I have had no such trouble installing MX and antix on this computer (DELL Optiplex 9020).    Antix also installed on the Latitude 7480. 

Is it possible MX / MX  purchased signing keys / EFI certs from M$, hence perhaps why these installers worked? 

(I'm talking hot-air here, since I don't understand those things in any depth).

I noticed I get the same problem screen at boot when I have tried Nomad BSD live usb. 

Any advice appreciated. 

Thanks all, and Tomas for your development work. 

I look forward to getting Slax working on something sometime (: 

Cheers. 

[parrothead]

It's not clear if you have got Slax running on any computer, modern or not.  Have you tried the instructions here vs. using dd?:

https://www.slax.org/starting.php

Also see this thread for more details:

https://groups.google.com/g/slax-users/c/KkV7z1JeSnU/m/mPHm9iJyAQAJ

I'd suggest having the USB key formatted as FAT32 if it is not already, at least initially to keep things simple.

Good luck,

Pat

[a name]

Hey Pat, thanks so much for your response.
Pardon my delayed response.

"It's not clear if you have got Slax running on any computer, modern or not.  Have you tried the instructions here vs. using dd?:"

No, I have not had it running on any computer. I am not a total stranger to making boot disks on linux through dd, or on windoze through rufus.

I have examined                      https://www.slax.org/starting.php  

I have a dumb question from that page:

"When done, one more step is required in order to make the drive bootable: navigate to /slax/boot/ directory on your USB device or hard disk and locate bootinst.bat file there (Linux users look for bootinst.sh). Just run it by double clicking, it will make all the necessary changes to your device's master boot record so your computer's BIOS could actually understand how to boot Slax from your disk."

Is this referring to making changes to the intended live  flash drive's MBR?
That is OK, but:
I do not want to have to make changes to my computer's main OS's MBR.

Also, ideally, I was not hoping to need to run a script on another OS to boot into the live OS at all. 
I was hoping just to be able to put it into almost any computer (which is not badly locked-down)  and have it run,
as with several other live distros which don't typically need such scripts to be run. 

Just plugging the USB in and selecting it on the boot device selection screen is ideally what I was hoping for.

Perhaps this is just not applicable with slax?   

Thanks again!

[parrothead]

Yes, running the bootinst.bat or bootinst.sh script will only modify the MBR of the device the script is located on (the flash drive), not the MBR of your computer's hard drive.  Tomas would not win many friends by breaking their Windows installs.  The script does show the name of the drive it will be modifying (D:, E:, etc. in Windows, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb2, etc. in Linux) if it detects the drive is already bootable.  You might determine ahead of time what name your flash drive has on the OS you booted to, before running the bootinst script.

After the script is run once to configure syslinux or extlinux, you can indeed move the flash drive from computer to computer and boot it just by selecting the appropriate device at bootup from the BIOS.

You might consider burning Slax to a CD or DVD first and then booting to that, to test it out.  You might feel Slax is not what you are looking for, before going further with the flash drive install.  This would also allow you to move the CD to the various computers you have and see how Slax looks/runs on each of them.

Pat