On Tuesday 27 August 2024 10:01:07 pm Andy Smith wrote: > That is the correct way to deal with Debian's ISO images. Whether > your BIOS supports booting from that is a bit hit and miss. It's > worth a try as it works a lot of the time. > > Also look in the BIOS settings for boot order priority. If that > mentions USB as an option then it's very likely to work.
Found that, finally, and it's odd. There's a selection for "Legacy" which can be switched to UEFI, and under the boot order stuff they mention USB floppy (!) and USB CDROM. I've fiddled with it. (...) > I'd try the USB media approach as it'll probably work. If the laptop > was never designed to have an internal optical media drive then it > was probably also designed to boot off of USB for installation > purposes. It has no place for an optical drive. > If that doesn't work, would it be possible to take the HDD/SSD out > of the laptop and put it in another machine? You could then install > onto that and put it back in the laptop afterwards. I don't think that I'd end up with the proper drivers if I did that... Digging a bit further and looking at the specs for this thing, it's a not-very-fast celeron dual core processor, only 2G of RAM, and 32G of SSD in there. I'm a bit less inclined to bother with it than I was. Maybe I'll try the memory stick and see how it goes... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin
