Porteus

I have an Acer ES1-531 series, model N15W4 dated 2016/08/13, it's an 8Gb RAM 2-core Intel 1.6GHz laptop which originally came preloaded with Windows.

I wiped the 1Tb HDD, cleared & set to uninstalled the TPM, cleared all passwords and secure boot settings, then loaded factory defaults in F2 BIOS/UEFI setup.

Downloaded Porteus-KDE-v5.0rc3-x86_64.iso & burnt it to a 16Gb USB flash drive

With legacy boot set in BIOS, and USB HDD raised to the top of the boot list, and the flash drive inserted, it booted up into Porteus no problem.

I was able to use gparted to set up the machine's internal 1Tb HDD with a FAT32 partition, all seemed fine

I ran the Porteus installer and it ran seemingly uneventfully. Ticked the box to install the bootloader.

Tried to allow the machine to boot using the HDD.. 'missing operating system'.

From then on I tried repeatedly many many times using different .iso, and different combinations of UEFI / legacy BIOS settings. I'm sure I haven't tried all possible combinations but a great many.. sorry I haven't documented each and every step of the way but I'm really struggling to get the system to install bootably to the HDD.

I can see the files there on the HDD on /mnt/sda1. I've tried in gparted messing around with adding various boot flags but no joy.

Tried in the BIOS with and without supervisor / user / hdd passwords.. with and without secure boot enabled..

Really lost with it all now tbh but, the experience when running direct from the USB stick is really good & keeps me going hoping to get it actually HDD-installed..

Any suggestions appreciated as I keep trying, thanks :-)

Suggestions:

1. Notes I have referencing a USB drive but should pertain to a hdd also. 2. Read the ISO's USB_INSTALLATION.txt

3. Create a small FAT32 partition on your hdd. .5 GB should be more than enough. Mark it as Primary.

4. Copy all the ISO files to the FAT32 partition.

5. Run the Porteus install app on the drive.

6. If your machine is UEFI based, disable Secure Boot.

Try booting the machine and let us know what happens.

HDD sda1's Partition Table was showing as GPT. I used Device > Create Partition Table to create msdos Partition Table.

Followed everything else above as noted

Booted from HDD no problem! Thanks for the solution!

It only works when I have the BIOS set as legacy though. If I enable UEFI, no matter what I do regards disabling secure boot, setting or unsetting passwords, clearing and disabling the TPM & secure boot settings records, or changing the boot order, the system will not boot from either USB or HDD. I just get a little graphic in the middle of the screen that says "No Boot Device".

It's academic to an extent - I'm planning to use this machine on the bench mainly just as a programmer for SPI flash chips using flashrom and a USB CH341a programmer dongle, so being limited to legacy BIOS probably wouldn't cause any problem?

The tinkerer in me wouldn't mind digging down though, to why it won't boot as UEFI so if anything comes to mind it'd be interesting!

Porteus on UEFI-ONLY: rock solid boot!

If you are not getting it done, PM that member. He will be glad to guide you.

Did you copy the EFI folder from the ISO to the boot partition? When you tweak the machine's UEFI Secure Boot setting did you check that the Porteus drive was added to the EFI boot list? Does GParted show your FAT32 partition flags as "boot, esp"?

Something that might help. I was just having a similar issue.

TL;DR, to get it to boot, I had to run gdisk on the drive to fix the following gdisk detected issue (still not sure why it happened):

Warning: The 0xEE protective partition in the MBR is marked as active. This is
technically a violation of the GPT specification, and can cause some EFIs to
ignore the disk, but it is required to boot from a GPT disk on some BIOS-based
computers. You can clear this flag by creating a fresh protective MBR using
the 'n' option on the experts' menu.

Here's, I think, a full description of my steps, as I still don't know why this happened. Maybe it's a quirk in the Porteus bootloader installation?

I started out with a blank, but already formatted external USB 3.0 drive that had been formatted within Windows as MBR NTFS. I wanted to install Porteus onto it, but my target machine was UEFI boot only.

So, I used gparted from within another Porteus install to reformat the drive as GPT FAT32. Then, I ran the Porteus installer, and chose the option to install the bootloader, and typed ok, and it finished. But, on reboot, after configuring my BIOS to boot to the drive, it did not get to the Porteus bootloader screen, instead, saying missing operating system, or whatever. Then I realized that the EFI folder had not been copied over by the Porteus installer. I also realized that the installer had copied over the configuration of the Porteus install that I had been using, not a fresh install. Regardless, I first tried to just add a copy of the EFI folder, but even that wouldn't get to the Porteus bootloader screen. Then, I deleted the three folders and copied fresh ones over from the ISO.... but it still didn't boot (actually, the BIOS wasn't even detecting the drive as UEFI bootable at that point).

Finally, I ran su, then gdisk /dev/sdb, chose the v option (which gave me the above warning), and then used the x option->n option->w option to fix it. After that, I was able to boot from the drive.