DATAPUISTOKEMISTI

(This is a long post. Everyone can make their own TL;DR by copy-pasting it into their favorite AI and asking for a summary.) About a week ago I dug an ancient Dell M4600 laptop out of a cupboard to give it a new use. It was high-end hardware in its day, with a 2nd gen Core i7, and still perfectly good as a headless Linux server for hobby projects. While working on it, I needed to boot the machine from a USB3 flash drive plugged into a USB3 port. That did not work, because Dell never released a BIOS version for this machine that supported booting from the USB3 ports. Only the USB2 ports on the other side are bootable. I bounced the problem around a bit with codex-cli + astra6 high/xhigh. The AI pushed back pretty hard, saying the whole thing was basically impossible and too risky, and eventually it even started blocking the discussion as a cybersecurity issue. By now I have enough experience arguing with AI models that we eventually got past that too. Usually it is enough to get the AI ...

There's Dell drivers for Windows 10 but they fail to install. Reason is that you first need to upgrade firmware of Ericsson 3G WWAN module.

Ericsson has manufactured probably millions of faulty 3G WWAN modules that hang after few minutes to few hours of use. There's driver and firmware updates out that may sometimes help but usually only by extending time before hang bit longer.

Dell Latitude 10 Tablet, identified as ST2 Late-2012 by Dell, really sucks. It's shipped with very first Win 8.0 build and after two years of updates it's barely usable with Win 8.1 + all available updates and fixes. I wanted to give Windows 10 try on it as already being worst tablet ever it can hardly get any worse, right? Reinstalling Win 8.1 goes exactly like Win 10 so below applies to both.

After realizing that LSI SAS1078 based controller wouldn't do what I want I ended up purchasing card from eBay, 65€ including shipping for unused, new in box Dell PERC H310. Prices are bit higher than I like, but this was acceptable knowing it will do exactly what I need. Despite trying hard card will still show up as DELL after making these changes but it's in IT-mode and accepts generic LSI firmware.