No OS on a Asus Chromebook C434

Support
1

My son has given me an Asus Chromebook C434 8GB ram. His work had a few of them which were running windows, this is one of them. On starting it up it would fail for the eMMC device and Windows boot manager and end up in the UEFI shell. If I exit out of that I end up with a boot config screen titled “Asus Chromebook C433/C434 (Shyvana)” The next line is “FW: MrChromebox-4.19.1 01/29/2023”

I’d like to restore ChromeOS, I’ve created a micro SD with the contents of chromeos_16433.65.0_rammus_recovery_stable-channel_RammusMPKeys-v8.bin, but all the instructions say to hold + then power and I should get to the recovery menu, but I get go back to MrChromebox.

Trying to boot from the micro SD I get “GNU GRUB” the options “Local image A”, “Local image B”, “verified image A”, “verified image B” and “Alternate USB Boot”. This looked promising, but none of these work.

I’d appreciate any pointers to a next step.

Thanks

2

you need to:

  • boot a Linux Live USB
  • run the MrChromebox script
  • restore the stock ChromeOS firmware
  • reboot
  • use the ChromeOS recovery USB

There is no recovery mode with the MrChromebox firmware, nor can you boot a ChromeOS recovery USB. You have to go back to the stock firmware first. I’m guessing you don’t have a backup since the machines came pre-flashed, but the script will give you the option to restore using the generic/shellball firmware on the recovery USB.

3

Great, thanks. I did experiment with a linux live USB, and that worked.

much appreciated!