I was given an ASUS C536 “DELBIN” that doesn’t boot. After charging the battery up to full, I am able to get it to boot to the ChromeOS Recovery screen. I have a Recovery USB with the latest Stable build of ChromeOS for DELBIN. The Recovery always fails with an error. I was able to find a Diagnostics screen and when I select “Storage Diagnostics” it says that “no storage is found”. I am assuming that the internal storage is dead…
Ideally, I’ll like to fix the eMMC storage error, if that’s possible… but if not, what are my other options? Is the machine dead? Is there a way to boot anything else on here, from USB or SD card? It’s a shame - the machine is “like new” and I’d really like to use it.
To preface this, I am just a regular joe, by no means an expert.
What I would do:
First: Open the machine, see if there is anything obvious wrong, if the storage is replacable → replace and try again.
If that fails:
Usually in a case like this on a non Chromebook/ Apple device, you could still try to boot from a USB stick into a live environment or install an operating system to a usb drive.
This is not so simple on a chromebook, because the stock firmware per default does allow booting images only signed by Google. To circumvent this you need to manipulate the gbb flags of the stock firmware.
After skimming the documentation there, this should be possible from the recovery screen.
After that, enable legacy boot mode and boot a live iso of your choice through the stock firmware.
If the storage is cooked and soldered to the board, booting from a USB stick should be possible. You could even install Linux on it. In theory it could be possible to remove USB stick after boot depending on the distro/ configuration you use, but this is something that would probably take more research on your part to achieve.
I took the cover off this morning - and sure enough, the NVMe had been removed!?!? I didn’t even know the DELBIN had removable storage… anyway, I put in a spare NVMe and installed my recovery image — the DELBIN is working fine now.