I recently purchased a second-hand HP Z400 Workstation: Xenon 3680 Hexcore 3.33 GHz, 24 GB ram 2 TB hdd, with Windows 10 installed. My intentions are to Tri-boot Windows 10, Ubuntu 18.04, and Deepin 20/beta; however, the computer will not boot the Linux OSes, nor any Linux live DVD from DVD drive or USB -- (so far, I've tried Ubuntu, 18.04 and 20.04, Linux Mint 19.3, RescueSystemCD, and Deepin 20/beta).

I've googled this problem every day for over a week and have gotten either no usable advice or suggestions that I don't have the technical expertise to try to implement. (And, by the way, the gentleman whom I bought the HP Z400 from doesn’t have the technical expertise to help me either – he did tell me that should I decide the put it back on Craigslist, I shouldn’t have any problems finding a buyer as he’s gotten plenty of calls from prospective buyers even after I bought it).

At this point, I strongly suspect that this problem may be rooted in a RAID configuration. I want to include some photos and screenshots from my monitor. Regarding changes I thought I could possibly I make in the BIOS, I found directions to disable SecureBoot and enable Legacy Boot, but the BIOS on this particular Z400 doesn’t include those options. So I thought about updating the BIOS, but found at https://support.hp.com/us-en/warrant...69?sku=FM080UT that the End-Of-Life for support for my computer has already happened. Someone at HP Customer Forum says that even though it’s past E-o-L the Z400’s BIOS can still be upgraded, but don’t try it with Windows 10 because Windows 10 didn’t come out until after the Z400’s E-o-L.

I’ve noted that HP did support RHEL and SLED for the Z400, but in both cases, that support required special installer disks that did not include the actual RHEL or SLED operating systems. (I presume I can still download the installer disks from HP; and as far as the actual operating systems go, I wonder if Fedora or CentOS will do instead of RHEL and/or if OpenSuse or Tumbleweed would suffice instead of SLED?) And I’m only assuming that if I could get any Linux operating system installed on my Z400, then others could follow without ado.

Perhaps the photos and screenshots bear some explaining.

At some point, it occurred to me that maybe this might be a PBKC situation; therefore maybe a viable solution might be for me to get up and do something. So I turned off the computer, got up and switched harddrives between my new computer: HP Z400 Workstation, Xeon 3680 hexcore 3.33 GHz, 2TB hdd; Windows 10; and my old computer: Optiplex 960, Intel Core2 Duo, 3.0 GHz, 6 GB ram; Ultimate Edition Oz Unity Star Sapphire (discontinued Ubuntu 14.04 remix upgraded to a 16.04 base); Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia/Mate. So now, my current setup is reflected in my signature (see below). ROM messages that displayed on the monitor during boot up, I took pictures of with my smartphone.

Since the 2TB hdd does boot on the Optiplex 960, I installed Ubuntu 18.04/Mate onto it using the installer option to install alongside of Windows 10; and then from there, used Ubuntu’s Gparted (Gnome Partition Editor) package to resize the Windows partition for space to install Deepin 20/beta. With the 160 GB hdd that I took out of the Optiplex 960 now in the Z400, while Linux Mint 19.3 doesn’t boot, Ultimate Edition Oz Unity Star Sapphire does.

So Let my sum up my question. How can I get the HP Z400 to boot the Linux operating systems after I put the 2TB hdd back in?

Secure boot(?).

More than a few Linux fully support uefi/secure boot. You need to start at bios. Windows 10 may be in a (forgot name) setting where it can lock bios. (fastboot??)

I guess it's possible that efi shell may be needed to import keys or properly select UEFI dvd boot choice.

Start at bios.

Windows 10 may or may not have to have uefi secure boot enabled. I'd imagine that this system does have both.

Go to bios.

Just to let you know. This system should easily support any of the common virtual machines to run windows and linux at the same time.

Your Z400 appears to have a weird spec. see the Quickspec sheet for it. It should come with a quad Xeon. Mine has a W3550, 16Gb of memory and a 2Tb disk. Yup! it's secondhand from a broker and has a bog standard BIOS (no uefi) version 3.60 in my case though I know there's a V3.61A or thereabouts available.
I'm running Linux Mint 18.3 at present with relatively few problems. It sometimes decides it won't boot and sits looking at me after the Grub screen times out. A hard power off and it's either fine next time with a couple of lines about something that already exists before booting or I can boot the previous kernel instead.
It was fine booting from DVD to do the install way back.

Hope this helps,

Play Bonny!

In BIOS, change the boot order.

In my one computer which has UEFI, I do not recall a boot order setting, but, if I enter the UEFI during POST, there is a dialog to choose the boot device.

Changing the boot order does not help in the least. Boot order has nothing to do with my problem.
But I do appreciate you taking the time to try and help me. 🙂

Would be nice to tell us what bios said about the devices it sees to boot from.

To boot to a modern fully tested DVD in linux that has full support for UEFI and Secure boot and Fast boot disabled you should see a UEFI optical choice.

efi shell will work too.

As I said in post #6, the Z400 has a standard BIOS (Not UEFI) so there's no legacy selection or secure boot to worry about. It's from 2009 for Pete's sake! 11 years old! Mine works fine.

Play Bonny!

When I put both hard drives in (the Z400) this morning, this is what I got on screen: (I hope this photo uploads)-- No; it's not uploading because it's too big. I wonder how I can make it smaller?

Instead of trying upload the actual photo (too big), I emailed it to myself, downloaded it, opened the file, and took a cropped screenshot of it. And that's what did upload.

The Star Sapphire OS that the Z400 does boot when I only have the 160 GB hard drive in by itself doesn't boot when I have boot hard drives in the Z400. (The Optiplex 960 is small form factor and does have enough room for two hard drives. In fact, it doesn't have enough room for the 2TB hard drive; when I connect it to the Optiplex, I have to let it hang by the drive cables outside the tower.)

But I have arrived at a work-around adequate for my more immediate purposes.

I've been grappling with this problem ever since I bought the computer two weeks ago; and a couple of nights, I've fallen asleep frustrated over not finding a solution.

Friday morning when I woke up, I found myself remembering some long-forgotten incident where I'd gone on a two-hour one-way (five hours round trip including time in the store) bus ride to buy a wifi card. Got it home and it didn't work. So I went to the library to do some research and made another five-hour bus ride to exchange it for another one that would work on the Dell Dimension 8300 computer I was using at the time. Got back home and it didn't work either. Frustrated and with no more bus fare and with nothing else to do, I read the manufacturer's notes on the side of the box that the wifi card came in. It said it had been tested on such and such version of the Linux kernel -- an old one, I noted.

Suddenly inspired, I looked around for some old Linux operating system live CDs of various distributions and popped them in the DVD drive one at a time until I happened upon one that booted with wifi working (a Linux Mint, as I recall), and I promptly installed that baby.

So yesterday, when I got more phone service (I use my smartphone for an internet connection), I got on the internet and found out when was the end-of-life of HP support for the Z400 (March 29, 2015) and what was the then-current version of the Linux Kernel (3.13.0-24). That explains why Ultimate Edition Oz Unity Star Sapphire (a discontinued Ubuntu 14.04 Remix that shipped with the 3.13.0-24.46 Ubuntu Linux Kernel) booted on the Z400, but more recent Linux distributions won't. Ubuntu 18.04.4 Bionic Beaver and Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia ship with a v5.3 based Linux kernel (April 2018) and won't boot on the Z400 -- it's too new.

So I downloaded Linux Mint 17 Quiana, burned a live DVD, put it in the Z400's DVD drive to see what would happen. It booted and I installed.

Interestingly (see https://askubuntu.com/questions/9987...ng-kernel-3-16), no Ubuntu versions in 2016 automatically upgraded thier Linux Kernel when they upgraded their Ubuntu 14.04 systems to 16.04 -- in fact, when Ubuntu 14.04.5 upgraded to 16.04, the Ubuntu Linux Kernel downgraded from 3.16.0-30 to 3.13.0-100. If an Ubuntu operand wants to upgrade their kernel when they upgrade their Ubuntu version, they have to do manually. And Ubuntu even provides instructions on how to downgrade when a kernel upgrade breaks something or otherwise yields undesirable results. Well this is music to my ears.

So do I mark this thread as "SOLVED?" I don't think so. This work-around will work for me for now, but I still should be able to upgrade the Z400 BIOS or switch to another that will boot all the operating systems on both of my hard drives and others that I might want to install in the future.

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Different HP websites may say different things; (https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01709672#AbT0) says dual core and quad core.

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Oh snap, it is old and no uefi, now I wonder if it is fully 64 bit or one of those weird in between xeon's sort of 64 bit but not really.