Well that was new and irksome

[vakkotaur]

Winter-ish storm. Snow, sleet, ice, wind. Yes, those can be annoying as a matter of course and scraping car windows is not considered fun. But it was the power hit, the almost capable UPS, and the too-rapid shutdown of the main computer... and again as it attempted to boot.

Thus I have now seen "BIOS corrupted. Restoring from backup" (at least the thing HAD that and could do it). And then booting up worked... except most of the USB system. No keyboard. No trackball. Well, THAT complicates things some. Fortunately a couple ports did still work and there was a spare keyboard and trackball fairly handy. That let me at least get things to where I wasn't truly "dead in the water."

Looking at the BIOS (since restore was from a factory version how many years old? Turns out... about seven.) I thought I'd have to add the old "iommu=soft" to the boot parameters... except I've not needed to do that anymore. Hrmm. Oh, the ancient BIOS defaults the IOMMU to DISABLED? Switch that to ENABLED and things work right again.

I still have work to do. I am fairly sure there is an update I need to do. But now I can use the computer to get to it.