usb booted when no partitions on hard drive now I have a win xp system it won't boot

loojnkns · October 1, 2018 at 1:28 PM

I had a blank hard drive on old laptop and created the live usb stick and it ran fine, i then installed windows xp on a partition on the drive and installed a grub dos boot loader because windows kept crashing the install but finished when I installed the boot loader from a puppy linux cd and now the live libre elec usb won't boot. any ideas? I don't mind creating a partition and installing it but don't know how to do that and would need to alter boot loader. I did install the live usb to hard drive but it installed on the whole of a 365gb hard drive so I wiped that and thought I'd put a few different systems on. Any help appreciated.

bubblegum57 · October 1, 2018 at 1:35 PM

not an answer, but you could always install Libre to an external usb, then remove it, to boot to whatever you install on the hard disk.

**chewitt** · October 1, 2018 at 2:03 PM Official Post

LE is intended for dedicated HTPC installs so we do not support (and the installer will not allow) installations to a spare partition shared with other OS, it will only allow install to a complete drive. It's possible to manually work around that, and there are dual-boot threads in these forums if you go look for them. NB: As a general rule an RPi3B+ is a much better HTPC than any old laptop you might have.

loojnkns · October 2, 2018 at 11:53 AM

thanks for your responses, still don't understand why the usb would boot and run when no partitions on hard drive and then when I made a bootable partion and installed an operating system on it it wouldn't boot the usb after that. the laptop is a sony vaio and quite high spec, obviously I changed boot sequence to boot external device first. Really I should be able to run live from usb, surely? grub for dos is the bootloader I used.

**chewitt** · October 8, 2018 at 12:46 PM Official Post

It doesn't matter how cheap or expensive the laptop is; crap firmware is crap firmware.

loojnkns · October 13, 2018 at 6:47 AM

the firmware didn't change, it booted and ran from usb when there was no system on laptop then it wouldn't boot and run after I installed libre to hard drive on it, whether something wrote to the live usb when i installed the sytem to hard drive and stopped the usb being bootable I don't know but it has buggered that usb now and I am going to get another and make another bootable usb and try with that.

**mglae** · October 13, 2018 at 12:42 PM

Change the boot order in your BIOS to boot from USB first. Or look for the magic key to open a boot device menu.

IMO the boot order was always boot from hard disk first, but the empty hard disk was detected an skipped in the first case.

loojnkns · October 19, 2018 at 4:43 AM

I will find something that boots from usb to see if something else works, what is the magic key? like an f7 or something?

**chewitt** · October 19, 2018 at 10:28 AM Official Post

It depends on the hardware vendor, there's never been a standard for which key gets into firmware/bios

loojnkns · October 22, 2018 at 7:19 AM

right I booted my other laptop from a usb stick which i made with rufus and it booted, when I tried the sony it wouldn't boot, I think it won't boot from external device if there is a boot sector present on the hard drive which is really annoying and stupid, I am going to have to try to put kodi on a partition and try to boot through my grub for dos somehow. I will need to know what kind of partition to make and whether I need a boot flag and how to point my mbr to it. If anyone can help that would be great. I really need to use the sony as it has good wireless and is the only one that will work upstairs which is where i want to use kodi later at night. thanks for all your help up to now.

**mglae** · October 22, 2018 at 4:04 PM

A "sony notebook boot menu" web search results in i.e. How to Change Boot Order in Sony Vaio E Series - Laptops - Laptop Tech Support.

You do need to know how external device boot works to set up the ext4 partition(s) for multiboot. (or in case your XP does not boot any more).

There are several threads in this forum regarding dual/multi boor, please use the search function.

loojnkns · October 30, 2018 at 4:58 AM

not had a lot of luck trying to use two usb sticks the intallation just wants to intall to hard drive tried copying files ect. but with no luck. I have found a puppy linux distro xenial dog and it is ubuntu based and has latest kodi on it so made a live cd and booted that and could then install to hard drive partition. Would be great if libre could do a live cd, don't know if its possible?

**chewitt** · October 30, 2018 at 4:38 PM Official Post

If you can boot another distro from CD do a manual install. Create two EXT4 partitions in a GPT scheme; 1GB labelled BOOT and remaining space labelled STORAGE. Install a bootloader; we use syslinux but GRUB works fine too. Copy the contents of our installer USB to the first partition (BOOT) and crib the bootloader config from syslinux.conf (or extlinux.conf) using BOOT=LABEL=BOOT and DISK=LABEL=STORAGE and then reboot the laptop. If you got the bootloader config correct it will boot.