Aloha & Happy New Year

The problematic computer is other than the one I will use to communicate here.
Samsung laptop. Win8 (was soon to be dual boot).

The Win8 bacame locked up. (It started going through loops of disc repair screens, all which failed to complete..) Since it was a new machine, it was no big deal to just wipe the drive and go linux.

So I popped Gparted cd in and noticed that it wont boot from cd tray. Then gparted on usb- same thing, no workey.

Finally I got into bios (millions of ESC presses), to check on the boot order, so that I could boot up from cd or usb.
Well wouldnt you know, there is only 1 (one) boot option.
Boot Option #1..............Windows Boot Manager enabled

So far,
The OS on the HDD wont boot,
The OS's on the USB and CD wont boot due to the fact that the bios doesnt have them as boot options.

So how can I get to reformat the hdd and install the Linux distro?

Thanks

Set secure boot to off, and format the disk MBR, not gpt. That will mean deleting all partitions.

M$ insist on crazy stuff in the bios to prevent dual boot before they allow windows 8. So with my Samsung laptop, if you have gpt, that's a secure noot disk to the bios. If you have an mbr and 'legacy mode' that's a legacy disk (= no secure boot).

I parked the windows 8 (which is awful, I must say) disk and all, and installed a small ssd with one distro on it. I can go back to win 8 if I really need it by changing disks. There are(or were in your case) a number of partitions on the disk. One allows you to revive windows 8, one allows you to revive the mbr i think it's F4 on bootup to get into those menus.

Have you got your sdcard reader writing to the sdcard? Mine mounts read only.

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F4 made the Samsung Recovery utility start.
Running that...

Almost sounds like a hardware issue.

F4 in Samsung is their rescue for the system when m$ stuff goes belly up. IIRC it offers to restore the boot (from one extra partition) and/or restore the boot (Under m$ windows of course). That is, presuming you have those extra partitions, windows 8 and want to have it back.

Samsung also have a 128MB partition with no known filesystem and who knows what m$ is doing with that? I have a dd of it somewhere. Probably a database of the keys in nvram

This is why secure boot should be removed. It causes problems when people want to dual boot. I read online when people start messing with secure boot it affects linux and sometimes windows. Secure boot is a bad idea IMHO...

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Hi friends, thanks for the replies.

The F4 recovery went well, in that it re-installed Win8. So there's an operable machine again.

So now Im starting from base level, and want to make that machine a multi-boot. How do I get it to boot from CD or USB?

What I did with my Samsung laptop was

1. Remove the hd entirely. I left it for a future situation where dual boot is possible.
2. Install another hd (In my case a 60G SSD). Change Bios to: Secure Boot off (UEFI & Legacy OS), Boot CD first, hd second.
3. Install the linux flavour of your choice. Hello from RoseViolet, my Samsung 350V.

Apart from Secure boot and that messing, there is a very nice BIOS implementation in the Samsung. Close the lid and suspend comes in. Hibernate, sound, wifi, hdmi, card reader, even video camera all came up without effort. There is an option to limit battery charging to 80% to prolong battery life. All of this stuff I had to fight for and nail down in my last laptop - a HP job.

1 members found this post helpful.