Interesting problem.
I was loaned a brand new laptop to test for a full retail plus shipping I ocassionally work with and help.
It's basically a tablet with halo keyboard/graphics pad, something similar to Lenovo's Yoga Book
https://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/tablets/a ... ZITZTWYB2F, except it has a 'bit of grunt', a lot more memory (had 16gig with a second empty socket) and 2 sockets for ssd storage with a sandisk installed in one, 4096 units of pen touch pressure (by my linux-mangaka test), and a 16" touch/graphics screen and hailo keyboard/tabet. Only thing it had that peeved me was to have any standard usb sockets (they were all micro 'c's). But the "halo" unit does seem to be heavy enough against the screen part that I suspect it's mostly battery as well as for ballance. Perfect for the professional graphics/animation market it's trying to enter. Won't be cheap of course, but portability for onsite 'changes' has a very big value in that creation market.
Thought it was just the thing to try with easy 0.5! If it couldn't fly there .....
It was supplied with a clean system (empty hard drive, etc), and to give me a referance I used my external usb cdrom drive and a old puppy 5.51 'somewhat modified and expanded' self booting cd I often use to play with.pf12 and it came up nicely and told me a lot of nice figures, etc. , looked ok and hooked to the net, etc. without problems. Good!
So shut it down and plugged in my external powered hub and an easy memory stick (when will they start to make these with micro-usb!), and that was when things gave problems.
Easy 0.5 started up ok,
but then dropped out at initrd to it's shell with the usual warnings.
The main one was that it couldn't actually ?find q.sfs,
doing a few initrd commands (from my old referance book) showed me it could list it as being there and seem to have the right permissions, it just couldn't or didn't know how to do anything with a .sfs file!
I tried an easy 0.4 and had the same result!
Changed tactics and went over to linuxmangaka (another linux, but specifically designed for graphics work and built by some very smart people) and tried one of their's I installed onto a memory stick with uefi a year or so ago and tried that.
Bingo, it went through and started and run ok. In fact it worked beautifully.
Doing a bit of investigation, the main thing that stood out was the number of files in the efi directory and it's structure.
with easy it is efi/boot/ and 5 files including the .efi, the config file and 2 c32 and one c64;
with linuxmangaka it was /efi64/ and 58 c32's, the other two are in there but who knows where,
all I know it starts the linuxmangaka.squashfs without fail, but if I rename it .sfs it bombs.
I was wondering if others have problems with .sfs and if the problem is actually with the extension to the name.
I'm also wondering if that's the same problem that started to appear when the bios/**** changed format.
Unfortunately the machine has had to be given back. I have asked for another loan if possible at a later time, but having the first use was a pretty rare thing that I don't expect to be repeated any time soon.
and no, don't ask for further machine details etc., it was loaned on very tight conditions!