My son in law thinks I can fix just about anything but the truth is My kung fu is brown belt at best.

So he brings me this Acer laptop of his that wont boot. I cant find a Boot disk anywhere not even at Microsoft all they have is system restore files and  since he peeled off the windows product code. I figured he might as well run linux on it All he does is use the interwebs anyway so why not. Assuming there are drivers out there these days for the stuff on his machine it sounds like a good plan to me.

But how do I get the OS onto a hard drive that is windows formatted and wont boot?
That stumps me...

I haven't loaded an OS since I had win 98 running on a 686 machine, so its been a while...

At present I have a download of Fedora in progress on my machine and the hopes of getting it on his HD somehow.

Hit it a few times, and let me know if that changes anything.   

Quote from: Ddan on March 08, 2013, 02:18:00 PM
Hit it a few times, and let me know if that changes anything.   

It did change things, now my hand hurts.

I just assumed you'd use a hammer

Never assume. I assumed something that I thought the wife would like once or twice or umpteen times. You don't want to know...

r00tchick says to pm her

She does this all day long.

Quote from: Monsterlover on March 08, 2013, 03:26:36 PM
r00tchick says to pm her

She does this all day long.

I have a solution too...

but if C does it it's easier.

Are you looking to recover the Windows files or just start from scratch?  If you want to recover stuff, that's a longer post than this one.  If you're fine just wiping and starting clean, keep reading.

Pick your flavor of Linux and find their download page...  last I heard, Ubuntu was still the most user friendly of the distros, but YMMV.  Download the installer ISO (note whether it's a CD or DVD and compare to what you have available) and burn it to a CD using burning software that can handle burning images such as ImgBurn.  Pop it in the computer and power it up - if it works, awesome, if not you may need to adjust your boot order to get it to recognize the optical drive before it tries to read the hard drive.

Amen to what AdmiralKit said.   LinuxMint is also a nice flavor.  I bailed on Ubuntu when they introduced their Unity desktop environment.  Mint has several versions--try Cinnamon if you have decent graphics hardware, or MATE if it's not that decent but the hardware is still somewhat recent, or XFCE if it's older hardware, since it's even less of a resource hog. 

If the laptop doesn't have a cdrom drive but it can boot from USB (check the bios) you can also use Unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to create a bootable thumb drive from an iso image.

The cool thing about most Linux bootable images is that you can try out the OS on your hardware to make sure everything works before you even install it.

Quote from: r00tchick on March 08, 2013, 03:47:42 PM
Amen to what AdmiralKit said.   LinuxMint is also a nice flavor.  I bailed on Ubuntu when they introduced their Unity desktop environment.  Mint has several versions--try Cinnamon if you have decent graphics hardware, or MATE if it's not that decent but the hardware is still somewhat recent, or XFCE if it's older hardware, since it's even less of a resource hog.  

If the laptop doesn't have a cdrom drive but it can boot from USB (check the bios) you can also use Unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) to create a bootable thumb drive from an iso image.

The cool thing about most Linux bootable images is that you can try out the OS on your hardware to make sure everything works before you even install it.

Thanks admiralkit & r00t chick. It will boot from a thumb drive, thats all i have for an option anyway.
I was going to use Ubuntu but it seemed like they wanted me to pay for it. It wasn't much but i remember that Red Hat was free and what you paid for was support.

Quote from: Mendo Dave on March 08, 2013, 05:22:32 PM
Thanks kit & root chick. It will boot from a thumb drive, thats all i have for an option anyway.
I was going to use Ubuntu but it seemed like they wanted me to pay for it. It wasn't much but i remember that Red Hat was free and what you paid for was support.

So much for open source.

Quote from: Mendo Dave on March 08, 2013, 05:22:32 PM
Thanks admiralkit & r00t chick. It will boot from a thumb drive, thats all i have for an option anyway.
I was going to use Ubuntu but it seemed like they wanted me to pay for it. It wasn't much but i remember that Red Hat was free and what you paid for was support.

Its free. RC says you're looking in the wrong place and that you should go for Mint anyhow

If you use Unetbootin you can select from several distributions to download directly from there rather than downloading the distribution first and then using unetbootin to download it to the thumb drive.  I know Ubuntu is one of them.  It should have been a free download, I don't know where you ended up!

I'm re downloading unetbootin with a distribution onto a thumb drive right now. Its Fedora but if it works on his machine Ill try Mint on mine. 

It looks like this is working. It booted and is installing to the HD. Thanks a lot peeps.