I am far from resolving this. I do not have possession of this HP laptop right now. I won't get to play with the laptop again until Sunday. However, I do know that enabling HP Legacy Mode is not sufficient on its own. I tried this. Its not the same as good ole BIOS. Its a mode within EFI, which is an HP thing, not otherwise defined. You still need a GPT partition (apparently) for any OS under HP's EFI Legacy Mode. My immediate goal in this project is only to run KUbuntu (or any Linux distro) "LIVE" from an ISO image residing on a USB stick drive. I do not want to scrub the Win8 hard drive (just yet). Since the ISO-on-USB I have is not a GPT partition, HP's EFI rejects it, even in Legacy Mode. HP Legacy Mode defaults to the hard drive's GPT partition and insists on booting Windows despite the presence of the ISO-on-USB stick. Boot order is ignored. Possibly I could grab control under the Windows 8 Boot Manager (GrUBy thing) and have it boot KUbuntu from an ISO. I haven't tried this (yet). Another possibility is that I can expand from the KUbuntu ISO download to a FAT32 file system on a GPT partition on the USB. The EFI firmware should (in theory) be able to boot this directly without ever having to bring up (ugh!) Windows 8. The actual installation of Linux to the HP laptop hard disk awaits me. I am in hopes I can get GrUB to negotiate the EFI issues on HP.
> On February 11, 2020 at 1:47 PM Ron Lawrence <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I am not up on the lingo, but have dealt with something similar recently. I > believe you can revert the boot to USB with a BIOS setting. > > A quick search turned up the following, that sounds familiar: > > "To boot the PC you need to go into the BIOS and enable legacy mode." > https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Operating-System-and-Recovery/Can-t-b > oot-from-USB-or-DVD-HP-Pavilion-g6-2257sr/m-p/2305227#M411916 > > > FWIW > > Ron Lawrence >
