The HP Z400 I currently have has a corrupted Windows 7 installation, and as such it cannot be used. I'd like to change it to Linux Mint (with the help of my other much newer win10 pc), but I'm not seeing any success in installing it.

What I currently have:
- A usb installer with the newest Linux Mint installation media
- A usb with the newest linux suse flash bios media
(from https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers...tation/3718668 )
- an old HP Z400, that has the bios version v03.20 (instead of v03.6X!)
- In bios Storage > Storage Options > SATA Emulation > set to IDE

What problems do I currently have:
- When trying to install Linux Mint, it shows kernel panic when trying to install or launch (code 0x00000009)
- When trying to attach my usb to the mobo and select File > Flash System ROM it displays "Removal Media is bad or missing. Press any key to continue". Here (https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Busine...S/td-p/6671881) it was mentioned that I may need to gradually update the bios, but I wasn't able to find the bios install media lower than 3.57 from anywhere
- It seems there exists different bios versions for different OSs, I've used the Linux Suse this far as i guess it's the closest one to being linux mint?

How could I fix this so that I could install linux on the machine?

I've made some progress: I have installed the bios media into a usb 2.0 stick and booted to bios whilst the stick was attached to the mobo, the bios installation was successful. I'm currently formatting the usb to have linux and will reply with what happens

success! i'm currently updating apt and so on but it seems that the pc now works correctly. I've also swapped from IDE mode to the other one in BIOS after the installation completed

Hi.
I just picked up a couple of HP Z400 workstations with BIOS 3.20 and I'm running into kernel panics:
RIP: 0010:acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler) ... Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000009

while booting a USB3 stick with Linux Mint 21 installer on it (Mint is derived from Ubuntu/Debian).

Can you give more details about the steps you took to get things working?
What settings did you tweak in BIOS to get it to boot without kernel panics?
In the BIOS, I already set my SATA to IDE to no avail.

More detail about your BIOS install process and more info about the BIOS updater thumb drive? Is the thumb drive FAT formatted? What are the contents? Is it a bootable thumb drive created from one of the .iso files from the BIOS download (I downloaded 3.61 BIOS update)? I am trying to create the BIOS update thumb from a Mac and I selected Linux/Suse and it gave me sp85650.tgz file (dir list below).

Hello,

This post was quite some time ago and I don't have the media anymore at hand, but this post pretty much describes everything I did after updating the BIOS and OS. Unfortunately I don't remember what I did exactly, but I'll try to guesstimate what I did:

If I remember correctly, all I did was update the BIOS to the newest version with the settings I've listed in the original post (you can also try with the default settings). I think the version I had used was one of these SUSE versions like the post mentioned: https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers...tation/3718668
If the newest version doesn't work, try using the 3.57. I remember that I had huge problems doing this as well, and I think i just randomly tested different things until it worked, ie. BIOS versions, settings, linux mint versions and so on.

The bios stick was probably FAT formatted or whatever the default formatting is on the USB format app. Additionally I think it mentioned somewhere that USB3 doesn't work, but it could be that I'm just misremembering it. Just in case, try to use USB2 instead of USB3. The stick I had was able to boot, but I used it to install an actual Linux Mint onto the PC itself (ie. it was an installer). Make sure the linux stick is attached to mobo instead of front ports like the post mentioned, it could also have something to do with the kernel panicking.

One thing you could also try is to use an older version of linux mint, it could also be that the newer versions don't fully work.

I managed to dig the pc out from its slumber so at the same time I thought I'd share the info of what mint version and bios settings it currently has in case anyone in the future needs the install info on how to install linux mint hp z400:

## System info:
Operating system: Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon
Cinnamon version: 5.2.7
Linux kernel: 5.4.0-91-generic
Processor: Intel Xeon W3520 @ 2.67GHz x 4
Memory: 5.8 GiB
Hard Drives: 1001.3 GB
Graphics Card: NVIDIA Corporation GT216GL [Quadro 400]

## BIOS info:
Product Name: HP Z400 Workstation (VS933AV)
System BIOS: 786G3 v03.61

Storage > Storage Options:
Removable Media Boot > Enable
Legacy Diskette Write > Enable
SATA Emulation > IDE

Security > System Security:
Data Execution Prevention > Enable
Virtualization Technology (VTx) > Enable
Virtualization Technology Directed I/O (VT-d2) > Enable

Power > OS Power Management:
Runtime Power Management > Enable
MWAIT-Aware OS > Enable
Idle Power Savings > Extended
ACPI S 3 Hard Disk Reset > Disable
ACPI S3 PS2 Mouse Wake Up > Enable
USB Wake on Device Insertion > Disable
Unique Sleep State Blink Rates > Disable

Power > Hardware Power Management:
SATA Power Management > Enable
Intel Turbo Boost Technology > Enable
Enhanced Intel Turbo Boost Technology > Disable
EUP Compliance Mode > Disable

Advanced > Processors:
Hyper-Threading > Disable
Active Cores > All Cores
Limit CPUID Maximum Value to 3 > Disable

Advanced > Chipset/Memory:
PCI SERR# Generation > Enable
PCI VGA Palette Snooping > Disable

Advanced > Device Options:
Num Lock State at Power-ON > On
S5 Wake on LAN > Enable
Multi-Processor > Enable
Internal Speaker > Enable
Monitor Tracking > Disable
NIC PXE Option ROM Download > Enable

Note that you don't need to turn all of the settings to these but I copied most of them here just in case. If the installation seems to fail, make sure you're using USB 2.0 and connected directly to the motherboard. If that doesn't work, the next thing to try is to check if the installation media is correct. I no longer have the installation stick as I wiped it after installation so if anyone has any info feel free to comment