Running a single delete command in Linux can permanently brick some laptops

Feb01

by Sindy Cator on February 1, 2016 at 10:11 am

A user posted on the Arch Linux forums in early January wondering why their laptop wouldn’t boot at all after running a simple ‘rm -rf –no-preserve-root /’ command. It’s fairly stupid to run such a command, but usually not destructive to anything but the Linux installation. However, as it turns out, on MSI laptops it’s possible to completely wipe the EFI boot partition from inside Linux. 9233, the user who killed his laptop, said that it happened like this: So today me and a friend ran “rm -rf –no-preserve-root /” on a MSI Notebook because we wanted to get rid of the pretty bloated…