[Nottingham] Oh how I laughed

[Jason Irwin]

Great ideas in computing fouled up by incompetent twonks.

The Dell BIOS is simple but works.  I can go into various menus,
enable/disable devices for booting, move them up and down in priority with
a few key presses.
One of these options is "USB Device".  Awesome.
Use MultiSystem to through a few ISOs on to a stick, plug it in and reboot.
Whee!  New GRUB menu showing me Kubuntu, Linux Mint and bunch of others I
could boot into.
Absolute 100% pure awesome sauce.
The Dell firmware/BIOS dudes really we clever to make sure that feature got
in.
Oh my yes.  How convenient it is.

However is looks like the memo didn't get around the whole team.  Or
someone let the junior engineer does a bit of production coding.
Because someone in all their wisdom decided that is would be a really,
really good idea turn the USB hubs off and on again during boot.
Yes, if you boot from a USB stick; this Dell will switch it off.
How very clever.  Oh my yes.
How I laughed!  How I chuckled at the whimsy of it all.

Actually I didn't.  But as this is probably meant to be a family-friendly
list I don't think I'll repeat exactly what I said, but I may have rhymed
with "Clucking shunts".

Plop doesn't help either.  It can boot off the CD and let me select the USB
only for Dell so switch it off and on again.

And no, it's not the USB stick as I have tried two different ones in all
the different ports and they work fine on other PCs.

Jason "Seething in quiet rage" Irwin
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