Just gonna start from the beginning.
Delidded “old” gaming PC CPU, 4690k
Put on too much thermal compound, it would not boot but did not appear to be fried.
Relidded (removed excess thermal compound, put on much less) and now everything appears well (I can get to the boot loader and even get slightly past that)
Trying to boot a Linux mint thumb drive I made, running 64 bit Linux Mint 18.2 with Cinnamon.
I can get to the boot loader. Once I click “run Linux mint” or the compatibility option, things just stop happening. The screen is still lit up but nothing being displayed. Video output is going through an Nvidia GTX 970 (ASUS Strix model).
Tried booting from the onboard graphics for the CPU and can’t even get into the BIOS.
Is my CPU fried or could there be an issue with my copy of Mint? I checked the checksum and that appears fine. I am doing this because I’d like to get that machine running to have a Linux machine to play around with. I suspect it’s my copy of mint because when I tried this previously the machine would hard restart before the boot loader, but oddly enough could get into the BIOS
I would start by redoing the boot stick. Etcher should work here. I believe I had similar kind of an issue when I used rufus to make my boot stick. When you choose where to boot from there should be 2 different USB stick options. Choose the one with UEFI in front of it.
If this doesn’t help there are some bios settings that may need fiddling.
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I tried the thumbstick on another PC with similar chipset and CPU.
H97 and an I3, vs the problem PC which is a Z97 and an I5. Booted all the way to the desktop without issue.
But I’ll give your recommendation a shot since the other PC I tried it on was a foxconn board.
Interesting. Etcher finished but gave me a message saying that it got errors when reading the image back from the drive.
It very well could be the drive. Use a haggard ass USB thumb drive that was going to be thrown away at work. It still worked but we got new ones for free so I figured “fuck it”.
Still odd that it booted on the one PC and not the other.
This is how NAND behaves when its dying/bad sectors.
I was really hoping that was the case.
As hilarious as it would be to rip the delidded I3 out of my moms old PC and put it into this gaming rig, and thus have a delidded and watercooled I3, I would really like to get the 4690k working.
Is there anything specific to look for when buying a thumb drive for a Linux Live Image, or is it just “one that isn’t old and used to death from an OEM that rhymes with HELL”?
Generally, reads are fine. Its the write cycles that are limited with flash storage.
Modern SSD NAND can handles hundreds of write cycles per block before going bad. This has a linear relationship to the lifespan of the device. A modern 128 GiB SSD can write a couple hundred TiB of data before going defunct.
more space == greater lifespan
Since it was an older flash drive (assuming it is of low capacity <=4GiB), writing 4 GiB ISO’s will wear that drive down fairly quickly.
It’s an 8gb and was used as a recovery for chrome books for several years. Occasionally being overwritten with the latest version of ChromeOS.
I was thinking of just getting a little 32 or 64 gig to use as a live image.
Honestly, a 16GiB one is fine. Although, thats the new “bottom of the barrel” of garden-variety flash drives nowadays. But if you want to spring for a bit more quality, then a 32 should suffice.
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Would a “USB SSD” of similar size have any advantage or roughly just be the same?
More space for a better price.
More speed (although limited by the interface 3.1 Gen 1/Gen 2)
Generally more reliable.
I recommend getting an external enclose for a M.2 SSD. These are common and cheap; and quite handy if you plan to use this a lot.
Note: it will be bigger, depending on the size of the M.2 you get, but should still fit in your pocket just fine.
Also
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Ended up just getting a 64 gig Gorilla Drive because the M.2 enclosures are nice, but the drives themselves are pricey.