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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.