bios

An ASUS ROGSTRIX B450-F gaming motherboard that I have had been working perfectly fine for a year. Suddenly though, booting up the system resulted in the following message on the POST boot screen:

The system would shutdown and restarting would result in the same message. I couldn't get into the BIOS either as the del and F2 keys did nothing.

So I have a Xubuntu box, an old PC that was running Windows previously. All is peachy with the Linux install bar one thing: every time I shutdown the system, it shuts down fine, but immediately restarts again. This wasn't happening with Windows and appeared to be an issue particular to Linux or Ubuntu.

Do you have a USB keyboard? Does it work fine? Does it also work fine once you boot into your operating system? Does it not work at all during the boot process before loading your operating system?

If your answer is yes to all of the above, then you've very likely been an idiot like yours truly and enabled the Fast Boot feature in your Intel motherboard's BIOS without reading the fine print.

Using Virtualbox (4.3.6) on an XP64 machine, I ran into the following error while trying to install a 64-bit version of Ubuntu:

This happens even if the host machine is a 64-bit machine. To fix this, reboot the box and enter the BIOS. Look around for a virtualisation setting and enable it. Save and exit the BIOS configuration screen.