Why oh why!
 

FIRSTLY I AM A COMPUTER ILLITERATE. I've been trying to get LINUX on an old laptop for two mornings now and I am losing my mind.

So my friend Francis Dunnery suggested I try "revamping" an old laptop with LINUX. Great. have my daughters old HP envy she doesn't use, it's got windows 8.1 installed. I've downloaded UBUNTU 12 (thinking going with an older version might be easier?), I've downloaded the universal USB installer 1.9.6.6

My thing is this ..... the stupid HP won't even let my try and boot from USB stick. Opens up in the main profile every time. I've searched far and wide, I've done everything I'm meant to do and STILL can't get the laptop to fire the USB.

I restart in F10. I change the start up options, I changed the LEGACY OPTION. Still no luck.

CAN ANYONE HELP? Please. Surely someone out there has suffered the same fate. This isn't the only HP ENVY M6 sleekbook

How did you create the usb stick?

Also, any reason for going with 12.04? I know it's still supported, but it's not for much longer. I definitely would go with 16.04 LTS if it were me.

Hello and welcome to the forum :)

I can try. ;)

Did you disable "secure boot?" Also, you might want to try Lubuntu 16.04 instead of Ubuntu, it's designed for older systems, although you'll want at least 2 GB's of memory.

Regards...

I followed the instructions on linuxnewbieguide.org

http://linuxnewbieguide.org/?page_id=76

The pendrivelinux.com download.



I've then gone to

http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/201...e-windows.html

I CAN'T GET TO STAGE 5 ! To install the LINUX FROM MY USB stick.
It's very very frustrating.

I've gone with UBUNTU because it's meant to be most MACLIKE, yeah? I THINK I've disable my secure boot. I'm, like, 90 per cent sure I have

Also, if you've confirmed that your BIOS is set to boot from USB, try using a different USB port. I've had countless HPs that have one of the USB controllers go bad. Preferably try one on the other side of the laptop.

Ubuntu shouldn't require secure boot disabled. Their bootloader and kernels are signed by Microsoft so that they are unaffected by secure boot (not sure about 12.04, it's a bit on the old side).

Also, not sure who told you Ubuntu was maclike, but IMO, Elementary (based on Ubuntu) is SIGNIFICANTLY more mac-lookking than Ubuntu. Ubuntu is just...bleh (IMO).

nope didn't work I GET TO THE SETUP UTILITY and the EXTREMELY annoying alarm

SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
BOOT OPTIONS

CD-ROM boot enabled
internal netwrok adapter boot disabled
network boot protocol IPv4 (legacy)
Legacy support enabled
secure boo disabled
pending action none

both the UEFI Boot and LEGACY boot order are set to first USB DISKETTE on Key/USB hard disk

WHAT ELSE IS LEFT I WONDER?

What program did you use to create the USB Disk?

PENDRIVELINUX.COM universalusb installer

well, the wife is home now. Been on this thing for four hours. Time to shut it down and try again on Sunday. My head is about to explode.

From what I can see I've done everything I can. BUT THIS STUPID HP won't fire from the USB so unless I can get it to do so I'm stuck with my wheels spinning.

One gotcha which might apply is that USB boot might only work from one of the USB ports. I have a Dell Inspiron n5050 i3 which will refuse to boot from any USB port except for the blue USB3.0 port (my thumbdrives are all USB2.0, so they certainly work for any other purpose on the other ports).

This was a source of extreme frustration and mystery for me, until I finally tried the other USB ports.

I've got THREE USB ports. Whether they're USB 2 or USB3 ......... silly bollox here has NO idea.
How can I check that out ?

And as for cause for EXTREME FRUSTRATION. You got hat right. Frustration spelled with a big fat EFF indeed

Just try each one in turn, see if it'll boot.

As for whether or not a particular port is USB2 or USB3? Usually, USB3 ports have blue plastic on the inside of the port. But they're backwards compatible so you can plug in a USB2 device in a USB3 port and vice versa. You'll only get USB2 speeds either way, but they'll work fine.

Try that USB stick on some other computer. And please use a newer version of Linux.

tried them all. it's something to do with WINDOWS 8 I read it on a forum or something somewhere that microsoft put some kind of "PROTECTION" in place to have their stupid windows boot first. Soon as I get the USN to fire I'm off to the races.

Just got this one stumbling block.

Heeerrrrrumph

Incorrect, M$ didn't do anything to prevent booting of USB's other than secure boot, and even that doesn't prevent it's boot if it's got a signed kernel.

Pre-2006 computers don't support booting from USB. But you can boot usb from a bootable optical option. If it still has a functioning optical drive.

grub-mkrescue and other ways to generate a bootloader image to burn to disc. With btmgr / plop being the simpler pre-made usb boot image.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

I have had mixed success with "boot from USB floppy drive", some boards actually boot from USB stick with this option.

Here ya go. I am just going by what you are posting.

Linky

I have an HP desktop and although I have it set to boot from USB if there is one plugged in, I have to press F8 during POST to get the choice on screen. I can then choose USB and carry on from there.
I can't guarantee it for your laptop, of course, but it's worth a try.

Thanks for your suggestions fellas. And that F8 option might work.
I don't have the HP with me until next Monday. I've decided to go off the grid so headed to the mountains for a few days!

I have the hp stream 11. Once you hit the power you spam the ESCape key for the menus (closest key to the power button). Then F9 to select a boot medium. And down one arrow for my usb drive. Down two selects the internal one in my case. Kind of memorized since I dropped one of the two hp stream 11's and I shattered the screen. Which is fine for HDMI out once at a distro login, but grub ONLY shows up on the built in display (if it functioned).

It was the F9 boys! Which I tried before but for some reason today it worked lickety split. The only thing on my install (installing UBUNTU 12.04 LTS by the way) is that it didn't ask me about sizing partition. I'm not a WINDOWS man, DEF not a WINDOWS 8 man and I don't care if I have WINDOWS 8 at all. This computer almost went in to a recycler. ANY IDEA HOW I CAN CHAGE THE PARTITION SIZING POST UBUNTU INSTALL?

Any reason for the old version? 14.04 and 16.04 are both LTS versions, the 12.04 only has about 8 months of support left before it's officially declared end of life. I'd definitely upgrade to 14.04 at the least, and 16.04 is worth it IMO.

OK I've got 14.04 I'm just learning / [playing with UBUNTU. Pretty quick. Million times quicker than the windows 8 bollox HOW CAN I DELETE WINDOWS 8 COMPLETELY and release ALL THAT SPACE for my music and photo files etc?

Boot Ubuntu and open a terminal and run the following commands consecutively and post the output here and someone should be able to give you more detailed instructions. The commands will output information on your drives/partitions.

Lower Case Letter L in both commands.

yancek's advice will provide the info we need, but to be honest, if you haven't got much personal stuff eg docs etc on yet, you may be better to to just install 16.04 now and just tell it to use all the disk at install time (default I believe, but do check).

I see you have it set to USB diskette.
Have you tried USB hard drive for that setting?
The two are different and expect a different format for the drive. If the drive has been patitioned, even with just one partition, it is behaving like a hard drive.
A diskette drive has no partitions as such and the structure is different.

==================================================================================================== ===============================================

Maybe the USB drivers need updating? Or even perhaps upgrade to a newer op system.

Try burning a live dvd instead, and like others said, a newer version of Ubuntu.

That was not helpful.

USB drivers don't come into effect until some sort of OS is running. So in order to Boot from USB it would have to be a BIOS update OR perhaps some sort of boot loader that can be installed on a device that CAN be booted and then load USB drivers and simulate a reboot from USB.
I only know of PLoP boot that can do that.