Mastodawn

Ok folks, tech question.

My SO gifted me a fantastic little budget laptop made by Crealander. American Megatrends bios, Intel celeron N4020, comes with TPM 2.0 and Win 11.

Obviously perfect for a Mint swap! Except I can NOT force this bastard to boot from USB. It simply hangs after accessing the USB as evidenced from the activity lights on my drive.

I have done this many times but this stonewalling is a new problem to me.

Things I have tried:
different thumb drive

different .iso, different OS (tried Bazzite, Mint, and Mint light)

different bootable device maker (Balena Etcher, Rufus)

I've done every obvious BIOS method (deactivated the HD mbr, manually set boot override, tried with TPM on and off)

If anyone has any ideas I would love to try them. I've already run the debloater for win 11 but this nifty lil lappy still isn't snappy. Not slow, but certainly not as happy as Mint will make it.

Thanks!

Edit: I tried booting from an external dvd drive just now, no luck.

@TeflonTrout could install mint onto the drive from another system and put it back in once it's installed

@v_v solid idea. Last resort but doable

💙🩷💜Brett🐡🍉🐧1d ago

@[email protected] some devices, eg my lenovo laptop, will not boot from usb memory stick but will boot from usb external hard drive, try that next!

Frank Heijkamp 1d ago

@TeflonTrout
It could indeed be the trusted platform issue. You said you switched it off. If the USB-drive is correctly bootable one would expect it to work. Unsure what is holding it back at that moment.

Same. I suspect malfeasance.

@TeflonTrout My guess is that you don't have an EFI boot block and the BIOS won't boot anything else. Sometimes there is a "legacy boot" enabled in 'security' somewhere. Not that you would have bootable windows media but that would confirm or deny that hypothesis. If a bootable windows media device worked, it's likely looking for EFI. Also, it may not boot any 'non-windows' foreign partition (using the partition type ID)

I do have a legacy boot option, I have tried it both ways- legacy on and off. I do not have a bootable windows drive but can make one if I ever feel like it, I am on day 15 in a row of 12 hour shifts trying to amuse myself at work.

@ChuckMcManis ...which means I'm probably done trying to troubleshoot for tonight, brain is warm applesauce

@TeflonTrout Yeah, definitely not fun when the brain is sauce. It makes me sad to see perfectly functional hardware trapped inside insidious extractive polices.

Doug 🌈🇨🇦

@TeflonTrout is there an enable boot from usb? Also I had an older laptop that would only boot from the front usb port.

@Oldfartrant Yes, and it is enabled. MBT shows as viable in all configurations, regardless of whether the boot hardware is my thumb drives, tf cards, or dvd drive.

I had a similar problem and this is how I solved it:
In my case, the "admin password" field was empty. I put an admin password, and all of a sudden I could enable USB boot. I did the install and removed the pwd.
Job done.

@FrankauLux what the fuck? Mine is also blank. Trying now will report back in 10

Uilebheist 1d ago

@TeflonTrout @FrankauLux I'm guessing somebody decided to impose some extra "security" on what you've bought, by preventing booting from external devices unless there's an admin password and it has been used to set the boot device.
Of course, if somebody steals the laptop they have many ways to access its internal storage so it's just more security theatre.

@Uilebheist @TeflonTrout

Dunno if generalized practice. All I can say is that I work in a repair cafe, so I get all sort of computers and that did the trick on a specific machine...

@FrankauLux @Uilebheist

Did not work, but it was well worth the try and always good to add more tricks to the toolbox. Thank you!

@TeflonTrout @Uilebheist
sorry to hear that. Well, if you do find, please share. As you say, always nice to have one more tool in the box 😉

Uilebheist 1d ago

@TeflonTrout @FrankauLux It's also possible to be a BIOS bug. I've had a laptop which hung instead of booting if one did as much as enable boot from USB (even if no USB device was connected to it), and was fixed by installing new firmware. Now, this is clearly different, but maybe check if there's a firmware upgrade mentioning USB issues, or at least other people reporting USB issues to the manufacturer?

@Uilebheist @FrankauLux

Good idea, I'm also trying to track down applicable BIOS updates