I’m new to linux. I have an old HP Mini laptop that has an American Megatrends BIOS. I downloaded the Ubuntu MATE ISO and extracted it on my USB drive to make the USB bootable. I enter my BIOS options by hitting F10 and I reordered my boot options to boot first from USB and then HD. On reboot, with USB plugged in, Computer sees my USB drive and the Ubuntu Mate install begins. Towards the end, computer tells me I need to reboot, I click Yes/OK. and as computer begins to shut down I see all sorts of errors flying across my screen (I believe about missing files) and it just hangs without completely shutting down. I force a shutdown, and restart the computer. Ubuntu does not start up properly (as I expected after seeing the errors). I decide to try and boot from the USB drive again (maybe try to reinstall), but this time I lost the option to boot from USB. When I enter the BIOS settings again, I only see the option to boot from HD. No other option to boot from anywhere else. The only option I see in the BIOS settings to restore defaults is the option to “Load Setup Defaults”. But that does not restore my option to select boot options. I still don’t see USB as an option!
Any ideas why the install wiped out my BIOS option to boot from USB?
Any ideas how i can restore my BIOS options?
Thank you,
I have 4 HP systems. All of them are UEFI compatible. 2 of them will let you set a permanent boot order. The other 2 you have to F12 and pick boot device if you have bootable media. The media you are using has to be bootable or the only option you will have is the EFI hard drive.
If your bios is acting flaky you might want to go to HP.com and check under support for your product to see if there is a bios firmware upgrade and apply it. That is the best I can tell you without an eyes on approach.
The one thing I forgot to mention is that the 2 that you have to F12 wil let you go into the bios and set the boot order. When you do that though it is only good for that boot and then they default back to the OS Manager being the first option.
In both scenarios the thing to keep in mind especially when using a UEFI setup is that you will have to go into the OS Manager on a per use basis and pick which boot loader you are using. If you have the usb drive attached you have to pick the loader for the system on it. If you boot without the usb drive then you will have to change to the loader for the system on the hard drive. Failure to do this will cause a boot loop where the system will continually start to boot, error out and reboot.
I had a laptop with a usb 3.0 4 port usb hub plugged into it. Each port had a 128 GB flash drive plugged into it with a version of linux on it. Every boot was a constant adjustment of the bios OS Manager. If you pulled one of the dries out of the hub it would cause all king of errors. Because each boot manager was looking for all the devices to be attached.