Can't put linux on my notebook! [Updated]

Software & Operating Systems Linux
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—> Big Update on this post down in the comments!

Hello!
I’ve been a Linux user for a couple of years, since I moved away from Win-8.1 to Ubuntu as my only OS, in order to avoid Win10. While I tried other stuff, I’ve always been more comfortable with the Ubuntu and Debian side of the coin. However, I’m not that savvy with all the technical concepts included in Linux.

A few days ago I purchased my first Notebook, as I needed one for the university. I will only be doing really light tasks on it, and I want the battery to last. It’s a fairly underpowered 14" system, featuring a Celeron N3350 with a 500gb HDD, a 32GB eMMC drive (as boot), and 4 GB of ram. Nonetheless, the price was great (I’m a broke student). It came with Windows10 and a lot of bloat (also, cortana was enabled by default and spoke to me :frowning: ).

I’ve narrowed down my OS options to either Linux Lite, MX Linux, Lubuntu or xfce-Peppermint. As they are all able to satisfy my needs while being really lightweight. (you can help me choose the distro as well!).

Now here is where the problems start…
I can’t get the notebook to boot into a USB Drive!
I use Etcher on my main rig for my bootable USBs. However I also downloaded Rufus on the win10 notebook. Yet, none of them were able to have my notebook boot into USB. I’ve tried 5 different USB drives and the different OS listed above.
All of them worked perfectly and booted on my Desktop PC.

I tried: Pressing F7 when I turned it on. The screen redirects me to a boot option menu, and the USB drive does appear there. When I select it, nothing happens…
Also, I went into the Bios with DEL, and picked the USB drive as N°1 hard drive.
Also I tried disabling the Windows option.
Another thing I tried was disabling secure boot, enabling legacy, and other few things. Yet I still can’t boot into the USB.

The Bios is the APTIO 2,18,1263 American megatrends bios.
It’s actually a fairly complex bios with tons of options, you can even OC this thing (not doing it lol).

Here are some pictures of it so you can look around in the menu.
I really want this system up and running with Linux on it, classes start next week!

Main menu with info.

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Boot menu, as you can see, the USB drive DOES in fact show up there. I tried disabling Quiet boot as well.

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On the security tab I found this secure boot option, I tried disabling it, it also has more stuff on these menu.

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The chipset menu is really complex, with settings for northbridge, southbridge, and many more. One of the submenus has this, I’ve tried with MSDOS and ANDROID apart from the default Windows option.

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Some more stuff that seemed relevant:

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Sorry for the long post, but I want you to see this i’m not just pasting a .iso file on a random usb drive and complaining my thing doesn’t work.
Any idea you have, question, links, or something will be of great help. I tried finding users with my same system, but it’s a really generic local brand.

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Is the LiveUSB legacy (BIOS) or UEFI or both compatible?

Also can you share the notebook model?

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I tried both Legacy and UEFI live-usbs using Rufus. Still nothing would happen.

The Notebook’s model is Kanji Tamura Tamura Duo ( http://www.kanjitech.com/item/tamura-duo/ ) The brand and website is local and it’s on Spanish (hence why I didn’t specified it).

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Okay might be a stupid question, did you follow this?

Notice this:

if you need to use the USB stick with older hardware, change this to MBR Partition Scheme for BIOS or UEFI.

This will make sure you can boot from BIOS or UEFI

Also you might wanna try DD mode for writing data.

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Ok so from looking at the laptop, what i believe your problem is that some of those really small laptops have a 32bit uefi bios so you need a 32bit boot.efi file. i have a laptop that looks alot like that one from lenovo and it requires a 32bit uefi bios boot32.efi file to boot into linux

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Hey. Does the usb-drive show up in bios/uefi at all while plugged in?

I’ve had weird issues with different kind of laptops with “working” boot usb-sticks.

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Yeah I had that issue with one laptop that just refused to boot any USB drive for some reason. Solution was USB CD drive and burning LiveCD on an actual CD.

:man_shrugging:

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Tried both options, and followed a couple of tutorials, in case I was missing something.
Tried DD also.

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Yes, the bios does in fact show the bootable live USB drives.
However when I select them it just can’t start from it, and resets.

I will keep trying and post any progress.

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Enable ACPI auto mode.
Also, try making a boot stick in mbr mode.

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This might sound odd… do you have a powered usb-hub? try to throw that into the mix.

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done, with no luck :frowning:

OK, update, I made a windows10 usb installer from the official .iso from microsoft, and it does boot without problems to the installer.
So it’s something with the Linux Live Images that it hates.
Also I tried with a 32 bit distro, and it did something different.
It booted to a black screen that says it can’t read the files.

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I think the problem is with GRUB. Someone had similar problem, and using rEFIned bootloader worked for them.

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-laptop-and-netbook-25/jumper-ezbook-3-pro-can't-boot-from-usb-most-of-common-linux-distros-4175605766/

Sadly I am not sure on specifics.

Here the tool to create custom ISOs but it seems to be Linux only

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If the image is the problem you may want to hear this :wink:
your laptop is very barebone, however linux is not that resource hungry.
I think you would be fine with Ubuntu gnome for example.

for battery drain, yes it would drain more, but you are talking about a few minutes. So therefor I would personally just go with whatever you like.

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The most common issue I’ve come across for this is actually a Windows 10 issue… “Fast Startup” which seems to ignore whatever other device you want to boot from.

What I would try is boot up Windows 10, open up the Control Panel(not their new settings menu) and then go into “Hardware and Sound”. Under the power options click the “Change what the power buttons do” option and then “Change settings that are currently unavailable”. Then down below you will notice the option for “Turn on fast startup (recommend)”, uncheck that box, save changes and try booting from the USB again.

Hopefully that helps.

On i side note I can definitely recommend both MX and Linux Lite. I’ve ran Linux light on my old Optiplex 755 for about 4 months with little to no issues and I have been running MX on my main workstation for well over a year again with little to no issues! MX is definitely my favorite distro to this date, tons of nifty features and does run nice and light!

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Thanks for the tip, I will try that setting now.

Question:
What would you say is the main difference between MX 17 and Lite 4.0?
I see on distrowatch MX Linux ranking so high, despite being really similar (at least on packages) to Linux Lite. What sets them apart?

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Mx Linux runs from ram. While I believe Linux lite does not.

Edit: stupid autocorrect

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I’m not that keen on Linux and software, but that doesn’t sound right

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Some Linux operating systems can run from ram.

Because ram based distros run from ram the OS runs very fast. Getting to the desktop tho will take awhile tho, as boot ups are slow as things need to be copied from the HDD to ram and the same thing is true in reverse, shutdowns are slow because what is in ram needs to go the HDD to save your data.

This all seems very well and awesome doesn’t it? But don’t get too excited. Please be careful with RAM based distros. Because RAM can not save data when there is no power going to it. So If the power goes out and you have no power backup for your computer, you will loose all of the data in your session.

What easily usable RAM based distro’s are popular you say? Puppy Linux and MX Linux are the most popular, easy to use RAM based Linux Distro’s.

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Try this

Create a ubuntu install flash drive and add this file to the EFI/boot directory then try to boot the usb drive