I was traveling recently, and I wanted to do some experiments with TXT on the road, so I bought an HP laptop that supports the technology. It is an HP EliteBook 6930p. I got it set up with Linux and tboot, enabled TPM, VT and TXT, and tried booting tboot and a Linux kernel.
Something went wrong. My laptop hung and I restarted it. But it didn't start properly. The power light and other lights came on, but the display did not light up. The fan started and disk began spinning, but after about a second, the whole thing powered down. The fan and disk stopped, and all of the lights went out. Then, after a few seconds, it turned itself back on. But once again, after starting the fan and disk, and before lighting the display, the laptop shut off. This cycle would repeat indefinitely, the laptop turning itself on and off. I have to make it stop by pressing and holding the power button. In short, my laptop was completely broken and useless. Fortunately, being new it was covered by HP's warranty. They talked me through the usual minor fixits on the phone, removing the disk and such, and nothing helped. They finally told me to take it to an authorized repair shop. The nearest one is 80 miles away so it was not super convenient, but I did it. Unfortunately it meant that I was not able to take the laptop on my trip and was not able to do my experiments. I got back this week and picked up my laptop from the repair shop. They had replaced the motherboard and it worked fine. So I tried again. I enabled the new TPM, got VT and TXT enabled, and tried launching tboot. It broke again. Once again my laptop is useless. It repeatedly turns itself on and off, and does not even light up the display. It does not get far enough into BIOS to boot from a CD or any other medium. I am a little worried about once again demanding that HP fix this machine under the terms of my warranty. I did not go into any detail about what I was doing when it broke the first time. In fact I thought it was probably just a defective machine; I did not necessarily connect it that much with tboot since I was just getting started with it and had only used it for an hour or so. But with the same thing happening twice now, it is clear that I am breaking it. And I am not running Windows, I am using experimental software, etc. Of course the machine is claimed to support TXT, so obviously it should not break from running tboot. But this is such a little-known and new technology that I'm sure only a few people at HP are familiar with it. I am not sure how to proceed with regard to the warranty. I wonder if anyone at HP reading this might be able to comment? It will not be good if HP laptops are turned into bricks by running tboot. Hal Finney ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ tboot-devel mailing list tboot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tboot-devel
