I tried the new hard drive again and could not get it to boot. Finally talked to a
service tech at Memory Express and explained my predicament. He told me that factory
installed Hate bios will ONLY accept Windows Hate OS.

They have tried to install Windows seven and did get it to run on two machines. A couple
of others have just locked up and will not accept seven or hate. I put the original drive
back in and it does not accept my password. Now I will have to get them to try to get it
working again.

I am so mad I will get the case, motherboard and ram from Memory Express and put my own
together. I have been told I will need to get the Linx drivers for the motherboard from
the manufacturer's site and save them on a thumb drive to install when asked to during
bootup.
Any recommend for the Linx for this project.
When I get this running, I will try to return or sell the HATE computer!!
I am sending this from my Android phone.

Dale Davies



Let me get this straight. You might be getting wrong info.

Refresh my memory on this.

What brand of notebook computer do you have?
A new hard drive will not boot in any computer.
It must have an OS on it to boot.


A. Install the new hard drive.

B. Plug the USB thumb drive I sent into a USB slot.

C. Go into the BIOS by pressing esc or f1 or delete right
after you turn on the power. It varies with brand.

D. Get into boot options part of the BIOS.

E. Select boot from USB.

F. Save the BIOS setting and exit.

Mint should now boot off the USB and it takes awhile.
Once Mint is running
Mint will give you the option of installing itself on the
hard drive. It formats and partitions the HD automatically.


Did you get that far?

If not put the new hard drive in and send me the computer with
it's power transformer and I will give it a try.

You can send me the hard drive it came with and I can try
that but no guarantees.

Mint has been recently upgraded to fix the work space switcher bug.

I will down load the latest version and install that if I can.

You won't need any Linux drivers for the mother board unless
it is an off brand weirdo. I have never run across a desk computer
mother board that would not load Linux (Mint). Been doing it
for 15 years. What is the brand name of the mother board
memory express is selling you? Asus is the best. Intel also
makes mother boards.

Paul Lamar

I may be getting poor information. I will get the motherboard info for you on the
weekend (Canada Day long for us). I will also check at Memory Express to see which
components I can get. I might take you up on your offer. I did try to use the stick you
sent me using the USB save and exit. It would not complete this even when I left it for
3 hours. Now when I try to start it,all I get on the screen is a password box which
keeps saying wrong password. This is with the original drive installed. I tried the USB
with the new drive. Beats me as I am not very knowledgeable on the software end.
Screwing and booting stuff is usually pretty straight forward.

Dale Davies

Save and exit while in the BIOS? It only saves the boot settings.

Where are you Dale. What town?

Paul Lamar



All Windows 8 compiters have UEFI BIOS which, well, I don't know what it's supposed to do
except make Linux hard to install but there should be an option in the BIOS settings to
turn it off.

Everett Rankin

Secure Boot has arrived

A few weeks ago one of my computers, a desktop machine, called it quits after many productive years of service. Following a respectful period of mourning, I decided to go out and get myself a new desktop computer. Nothing fancy, just a nice low-end box. I settled on HP's Pavilion P6-2310. The machine arrived in a timely manner, I hooked it up and realized that in my haste to get my shopping over with I had forgotten one important detail: Secure Boot.

Secure Boot, in case you missed all the excitement earlier, is a technology which is supposed to protect computer users from malware by insuring only trusted software can boot on the machine. How this works is, essentially, the computer comes with a security key (or keys) and any operating system or boot loader which we want to run on the machine needs to have a corresponding key. The idea is malware won't be able to sneak onto the computer and get loaded into memory before the operating system. A side effect, which many do not believe to be a coincidence, is operating systems other than Windows 8 are prevented from booting too. For some reason these details had slipped my mind when I was shopping on-line. When I hooked up the new computer and booted for the first time I was suddenly reminded in an unpleasant way.

The first symptom was that I could not boot from any device except the hard disk. I was thrown into the Windows 8 set up process. The manuals which came with the computer do not mention, in any fashion, accessing the BIOS/UEFI, changing boot order or disabling Secure Boot. Typically in the past computers have displayed hints, such as "Press F1 to edit settings" or "Press F9 to change boot device" when they power up. Not in this case, no hints are given and we're left to trial and error. F10, I found, would grant me access to the machine's start-up configuration, but getting my thumb drive to boot took a few steps beyond that.

First I tried to simply change the boot order and was told this was not possible while Secure Boot was enabled. Hunting through the menus I finally found the Secure Boot feature and, selecting it, I was informed (via a big, red warning box) that disabling Secure Boot was dangerous and not recommended. Then I had to disable Secure Boot and re-enabled "Legacy" boot options in the proper order and then, finally, I was able to enable specific devices from which I wanted to boot. After that I was able to boot from my thumb drive only if I knew to hold down F9 while the computer was starting up, we're not given that information.

In short, to get to the point where we can attempt to boot an alternative operating system we need to know our way through six steps:

   Boot machine while pressing F10
   Find Secure Boot in the menu tree, ignore warnings
   Disable Secure Boot feature
   Enable legacy boot options
   Enable specific legacy devices, such as USB devices
   Save and reboot while holding down F9

To the more technically minded, this might not seem so bad, but keep in mind these steps are performed without documentation, with no hints and with big warning pop-ups letting the user know what a bad idea disabling Secure Boot is. This is not something the average user is going to know how to do, nor will they likely want to follow through if they read the on-screen messages. This is a problem as much of the growth in the Linux community over the past decade has come from the ease of installing mainstream distributions. Distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu have made setting up a fresh install as simple as "Insert CD -> Click Next -> Next -> Next -> Enter a username and password->Next". Computers with Secure Boot remove that ease of use factor by throwing up hidden options, scary warnings and multiple menu items which must be accessed in a specific order before the user can even get to the "Insert CD" part of the installation process. Certainly, system administrators and more experienced users can work around these barriers, but there is a large portion of the public which is relatively inexperienced and willing to try Linux if it is easy to set up. Secure Boot means Linux is no longer simple to install, or even try, from detachable media.

Now, you might be thinking, as I was, that it was foolish of me to purchase a machine with Secure Boot in the first place. After all, I've been warning people about it for long enough I should have been more careful. That was what was going through my mind as I went through the long process of getting my thumb drive to be recognized as a boot device. But then, the next day, I went back to the merchant's website and discovered something. There is no mention of Secure Boot, UEFI or Windows 8 certification anywhere on the page. How is a consumer to know, even if they are aware of the feature, whether a machine is locked down or not? Software freedom requires vigilance and I fear that is more true now than it was a year ago. Be careful when shopping for new computers, it is easy to purchase more trouble than one bargained for.