Removing legacy boot from a Linux live stick
Posted on in Hacks • 144 words • 1 minute read
I got my ThinkPad used for a bargain price but with locked bios/uefi-setup. Annoyingly, it defaults to legacy boot and there is no way to change that.
My previous workaround was rather involved and is documented in the Arch wiki. Today however, I bricked my system at work and had to restore it in a hurry.
It turns out that you can nuke the MBR of the live stick to remove
the legacy boot.
Make sure you know what the device path of the USB stick is. You don’t want to nuke some innocent hard drive :)!
Over at stack exchange someone had a similar problem and one proposed
solution was to overwrite the first 446 Byte of the MBR with
zeros. Find the device path of the live stick with lsblk and then
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=446 count=1 as root and you’re set.