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* Front panel
The case's manual has a terse illustration with two arrows to pull the
front panel "away and up" from the rest of the case.
Here too, the amount of force required to do that is terrifying.
Notice how [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUD0HyzVpLg][our friend here]] cuts abruptly at 8:17; that's because the
levels of violence required to tear that panel off are too graphic for
YouTube.
* Front fan
Remember that fan from earlier, the one with only 3 holes for the
motherboard's 4 pins? Turns out
1. that last "optional" pin is supposed to allow speed control;
without it, the fan always spins at full speed;
2. the fan itself (ZA1225ASL) is [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd6gDY7LPlU][complete and utter crap]]: it cannot be
disassembled, so no cleaning off the dirt, no greasing.
So the thing is loud, it always spins at full speed, and if one day it
decides to become even louder than usual, you're SOL.
* Motherboard
** Firmware updates
Quoth ~fwupdmgr get-devices~:
#+begin_example
WARNING: UEFI capsule updates not available or enabled in firmware setup
See https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/wiki/PluginFlag:capsules-unsupported for more information.
#+end_example
Quoth the wiki:
#+begin_quote
Most typically entering the firmware setup screen and enabling capsule
updates will cause this warning to disappear, and also make firmware
updates possible. The relevant option may be poorly labelled, for
example "allow Windows UEFI updates".
#+end_quote
Not seeing any such option in the boot menu.
#+begin_quote
It is possible, but unlikely, that flashing the latest vendor BIOS,
using either Windows or a LiveCD, will add support for [the thing that
correlates with capsule updates being enabled].
#+end_quote
Well then. [[https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B550M-A-PRO/support#bios][Vendor says]] "put this on a stick; reboot; ask the menu to
flash from the stick". Putting some feelers out first:
#+begin_quote
If you execute a UEFI update, this update might delete the existing
UEFI boot entries
— [[https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Installation][ArchWiki]], 2024
#+end_quote
#+begin_quote
Like others in this forum, I too suffered from a reformatted EFI
partition following a BIOS update on my desktop pc. I had no idea
that the MSI BIOS team doesn’t care about Linux installs, so to my
surprise, following the update, my system booted straight to windows.
[…]
Ultimately, I completely wiped and recreated the EFI partition with
gparted (fat32), changed the structure to GPT with gdisk, and then
mounted that partition in the /mnt/efi location, and then proceeded to
generate a new fstab with genfstab. After arch-chroot’ing into my
endeavoros install, I ran bootctl install (which complained about boot
loader not setting esp information) and then reinstall-kernels. I
updated the loader.conf with the correct default boot ID, and set the
recommended options. That got me back into my system after quite a
bit of trial and error.
— [[https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/endeavoros-efi-partition-wiped-by-msi-bios-update/54740][EndeavorOS forums]], May 2024
#+end_quote
#+begin_quote
when updating the bios, it cleared all my settings. Apparently, this
includes clearing the list of boot loaders, which it set back to the
default of just Windows. Sadly this bios does not provide the tools
to add boot entries as, apparently, some do. To fix it, I managed to
boot to a Linux live USB and add the missing entry using the efiboomgr
command line tool.
— [[https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/updating-to-bios-7a32v1q1-wont-see-linux-uefi-boot.388109/][MSI AMD forums]], August 2023
#+end_quote
Welp.
OT1H, I could dedicate a couple of week-ends learning the joys and
wonders of efibootmgr, gdisk & friends. OTOH I sort of like keeping
my desktop station… not bricked?
Pity, because otherwise I've had smooth and incident-free firmware
updates on other stations with ~fwupdmgr~ 🤷
* SSD
LDLC's off-brand SSD died, fortunately within the warranty period.
Replaced it, and… I guess I should shoehorn a joke about "a descent
into hell" or "the beginning of a nightmare", but that just twists [[./killing-time.org][the
knife]] ☹️
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