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.

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Chuck 1d ago

@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.

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TeflonTrout

he/him 1d ago

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

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Chuck

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