Samsung NP530U3C Series 5 laptop - No HDMI output no signal, Shuts down and reboots at logo

No external display

Samsung Series 5 laptop did not work with any external display through HDMI, different cables and different monitors, none worked, neither Debian nor Windows saw the display.

Solution was to connect the display to the laptop and _turn_off_ the laptop (not reboot - AC adapter connected is OK), then start the laptop. Then it detected the display and worked as expected.

Shuts down and reboots at logo

The laptop constantly shut down and restarted at the logo.

The solution was to move the boot flag for the disk from the /boot partition to the first NTFS partition. For some reason it failed to use the partition to boot on.

No USB flash drives are listed in the boot menu

For some reason there is a setting in the BIOS that seems to block the flash drives from being shown in the list.

Function keys on boot

F2 - Enter BIOS
F4 - Recovery
F10 - Boot menu

NP530U3C BIOS versions remarks

P15AAJ - beware of upgrading to this, it seems to disable the HDD light