Unable to boot into Rescuezilla (legacy BIOS)
The Swiss Army Knife of System Recovery
Brought to you by:
rescuezilla
Menu
▾
▴
Hi!
I have succesfully used Rescuezilla with my modern main computer.
However, the machine I'd actually like to use it on is my older system
that has a Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3 (rev. 2.0) motherboard with BIOS version
FD. As far as I understand, this is a pre-UEFI BIOS. The machine boots
into Windows even when the Rescuezilla pen drive is set as the first
boot option (and doesn't boot at all if I remove the drive Windows is
installed on). The image is the default
rescuezilla-2.4.2-64bit.jammy.iso, which I flashed using balenaEtcher. I
know the setup should be more or less correct, because if I flash a
legacy memtest86 image onto the same pen drive, the machine boots into
memtest86. No BIOS settings changed in between, same physical pen drive,
same USB port.
I would use the F12 key (or whatever key the Gigabyte BIOS uses) to be extra sure you're selecting the correct bootable USB stick entry: sometimes the USB stick can appear as multiple entries because the Rescuezilla ISO image supports EFI, legacy BIOS and CDROM style booting even when written to a USB stick using balenaEtcher.
I'd expect the legacy CDROM style booting should certainly work. For 2011-era, I have expected it to support UEFI + Secure Boot, so there could be other BIOS option you could change to still maintain your existing operating system boot settings while enabling Rescuezilla.
Side note: Since you're using a circa-2011 era motherboard, it may be worth trying the Rescuezilla release titled "Focal": https://github.com/rescuezilla/rescuezilla/releases/latest because it seems like some 2008-2012 era hardware have been less successful booting the Rescuezilla released based on the latest Ubuntu/Linux releases.
Another random note: I sometimes find unplugging the USB stick and reinserting it after a shutdown to be helpful in getting the BIOS to detect the USB stick, since for some reason (electrical related?) I've seen some (especially older) motherboards not be able to redetect USB sticks between reboots without this step.
Please let me know if/how you're able to boot the USB stick!
I was able to make it work! And even with the Jammy version! The solution was to select "USB-CDROM" in the boot menu.
Also, the removal and reinsertion of the USB stick after a shutdown was also necessary sometimes but not every time
However, on many boots, it gets stuck at this black rectangle after selecting graphical fallback mode. Sometimes it works. What's infuriating is that I do nothing differently from boot to boot. It seems to have a mind of its own...