Solved Parted Magic not starting and turning off the PC

I have Parted Magic on 2 flash drives and have been using the same drives for a long time without any issues, did not changed anything to the flash drives, today suddenly it's no longer working, plugged in the flash drive and went to BIOS clicked on the flash drive and instead of Parted Magic menu appearing got a black screen saying "ation" then the PC turns OFF, tried the backup flash drive, tried different USB ports, same problem, tried a flash drive with Windows on it, works fine, it's only the flash drives with Parted Magic on them that this problem happens.

MK77P said:

Parted Magic

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Don't know about that one but I have GPARTED [GNU Partition Editor] on Thumb drives and not giving a problem.

Unless you're one of the rare ones using mbr (which I doubt considering your CPU)I think you will have to turn secure boot off in uefi bios to boot from the usb drive. I also think the flash drive has to be partitioned as GPT in order to boot from it. Another issue is if your system has RAID enabled in bios, the usb drive will not detect your disk unless you have some way of inserting Intel IRST into the gparted usb. An alternative if your drive is not detected, is to change disk mode to AHCI rather than IRST.

I also use GParted. We just had an update today, so I'll check my GParted USB stick right now... brb.


I use the "Boot Menu" to choose a boot device... not the BIOS.
The USB stick shows as UEFI or not UEFI.

The UEFI option complains about SBAT (revocations/mitigations), etc.
The non-UEFI option, boots just like always.


@MK77P

I see you have an MSI motherboard.
Instead of choosing the boot device in the BIOS,
...try using the "Boot Menu" which would be the F11 key for an MSI motherboard.

If that doesn't work, try temporarily disabling Secure Boot, then use the Boot Menu.



Note: GParted is Linux based, so when it starts it asks some weird questions.
But it works, with Secure Boot enabled.


Due to the MS revocations/mitigations, any problems you have with bootable media can usually be solved by temporarily disabling Secure Boot, in the BIOS.
When you're finished with whatever you're attempting to boot from... just re-enable Secure Boot.




FYI, the Boot Menu, will look something like this... of course this is an ASUS Boot Menu, but they should all look pretty much the same.

Now the full error message appeared when using the boot menu:

And yes disabling secure boot made it work.

I just don't understand as why is this happening out of no where like this, could it have anything to do with updating the BIOS?

MK77P said:

And yes disabling secure boot made it work.

I just don't understand as why is this happening out of no where like this, could it have anything to do with updating the BIOS?

Click to expand...

No, this was due to a Windows Update. And it's to protect your computer, from "bootkits" like Black Lotus etc.

IF... you see two USB sticks on your Boot Menu (one labeled UEFI and the other... not), you need to try both of them.
For me, the one not labeled UEFI was the one that worked with Secure Boot, still enabled.

In my pic in post #4, you'll see that my Corsair Voyager GT USB stick, is listed twice.
For some things, I have to use the one with the UEFI, and for other things I have to use the one not labeled UEFI.

But, as I said... in all cases, bootable devices should work with Secure Boot temporarily disabled.



Hopefully, MS or the authors of bootable media, will come up with a more elegant solution in the future.



This all started in the middle of 2023, when these "mitigations" were still optional.
Microsoft warned that sometime in 2024, the mitigations would be made permanent.
I believe that the July 2024 patch was the one that made them permanent.


If you want to hurt your brain, this early in the morning...



Here's the NSA's explanation (PDF), which may or may not be easier to understand...

Black Lotus Mitigation Guide - PDF

I just had the same thing. My parted magic usb had an error message come up when trying to boot from it and shut the laptop down. I bought a new copy of parted magic and burned that to the same usb and it was ok then.

I use GPARTED as part of a Linux LiveUSB Thumb drive, latest issue for me with Win11 Home is it can't access the OS drive because of Bitlocker automatically being installed and activated on the OS drive during install and did not ask for nor give the key to allow access. I discovered the issue by having booted to the USB to test it before going on a service call and couldn't access the Win11 drive. The 2 new Notebooks I tried it on were a Lenovo IdeaPad from Oct. and Dell Inspiron just on Monday.

Edited my post above. The second machine I tried it on just comes up with “selected boot image did not authenticate”. But it worked ok half an hour earlier on a different machine.

This was due to a Windows Update as Ghot mentioned and they (Parted Magic) released an update which resolved the issue.