On 2025-10-15, Maureen L Thomas <[email protected]> wrote: > > A friend of mine bought a refurbished computer. It is an all in one > ThinkCenter by Lenova. I have changed settings in the CMOS so that the > USB would show up first. Nothing that I have done works. It just says > no files to load and I tried many times. It is an older computer and it > weights a ton. Can anyone tell me how to get Linux on this machine. > Since I did not buy this one I have no idea what is inside of it. Hope > some knows how to get around this problem. > >
I refurbished my machine (put in extra RAM, a network card, and an SSD) and tried to boot from the debian 13 netinstall iso I'd written to a USB dongle previously (when I was using the machine with spinning rust on Debian 12). It wouldn't boot from the dongle. Something about wrong magic number, which is juicy slice of explicit, concrete information that's absent from your post. To put it briefly, I went up to the Leclerc shopping center up the road and bought another USB dongle as well as an OTG cable (as I'd downloaded the Debian iso to my phone). I wrote the Trixie netinstall to my new USB drive with EtchDroid. It booted (you must choose plain old USB rather than EFI USB to use a legacy BIOS). I think my BIOS is really too legacy for my own good. At any rate, LXDE is snappy (but adding apps to the panel crashed twice, leaving me with a screen blanker than some minds---no menu, no taskbar, no xterm, no nothing). Come to think of it, I should've alt-F2 or three or four and gotten to the console to kill this or that or reboot. But I didn't. There is an upper row of keys above the upper row of keys on my keyboard and one of them is mapped miraculously correctly (Z'). It puts the machine into a half-dormant state from which it awakens at the lightdm login screen, and from there, you can reboot. Your post lacks the necessary detail for assistance.
