Adding USB3 boot support to Dell M4600 laptop
(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 ...