Comment 61 for bug 1040557

At my university, we bought several Samsung Series 5 laptops (NP530U3C model). Our students bricked four of them when installing Ubuntu. I sent them back to Samsung that repaired them promptly by warranty service.

I don't know exactly what Bios configuration neither what Ubuntu version each student tried. I only know they installed Ubuntu from a USB stick.

Now the good news: I have just installed ubuntu-12.04.1-desktop-i386 in five of these laptops without problem. The procedure I followed was shrink Windows, disable UEFI in BIOS, and boot from a ISO CD with Ubuntu (not a USB), with an ethernet conection.

I want to remark something strange: on two of these laptops, after installing and do a power off cycle, both laptops frozen at BIOS screen ([F2] and [F4] message visible, but irresponsive to keyboard). However I do not power off the laptop because I did fear to brick it again. Actually, I waited for around 10 minutes, and magically the laptop resumed itself. But after a few seconds it frozen again with a black screen, and after 10 minutes it resumed the boot procedure (Grub screen). And now they are fully funcional as in Linux as in Windows.

(The other three laptops were installed flawlessly, without any freeze at all).

I suppose that these frozen lapses can be due to an automatic BIOS upgrade. If so, power down the computer at this moment (as many of us did) will brick it.

bios version = micom version = P03AAJ