Just when I thought some form of normality had occurred, a curve ball comes hurtling in. Our HEPC decided to curl it’s toes up and stop. I problem, I thought, I will just get rid of Windose (love that term) and install Ubuntu. Well, now the fun starts because I can’t get Ubuntu to boot from the usb to even install it! I hate to call out for help again so soon but, I have tried three different instances of Ubuntu and none of them work and I’m at my wits end! Any thoughts please?
What type of High Energy Particle Collider is it ?
Although almost all of them run Linux, none of them run Ubuntu, and none of them run MS-Windows 
The immediate thought is, ofcourse, that if Windoze stopped and Ubuntu won’t boot that the hardware is fried.
If it won’t boot from USB at all, chances are that your CPU is dead, or if you’re lucky, a general power failure.
What have you discovered so far ?
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Dang, can’t get a decent Collider in this day and age! You make a good point regarding the cpu and or power supply. I can get into the boot menu/bios settings okay so I presume that the power supply is good.
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That means that the CPU and your GPU is okay too.
Which leaves the south-bridge or RAM:
If you can boot into a mem-test:
- it means your southbridge/USB is probably OK
- you can (and should) now run a RAM check, just to make sure RAM is OK
If it passes the above, onto the next step.
Connect your boot-stick and see if it is recognized in the BIOS.
- if it isn’t , then either the stick or your southbridge is dead.
- if it is recognized, check if your BIOS/UEFI is in compatibility mode (CSM)
Ubuntu sticks often refuse to boot in this CSM mode because of how their ISOs are formatted. Not every old BIOS (including new BIOS in CSM mode) is compatible with the way they do it.
onto the next step: the Ubuntu installer.
Know this: Ubuntu completely fscked up their installer after 22.04LTS
It is now a highly unreliable experimental piece of cowdung written in flutter, confined in a snap, running in parallel with a resource hungry disk-checker.
What could possibly go wrong ? right ? 
So to eliminate this, you might try Lubuntu or Kubuntu because they both have a reliable installer (calamares).
If all else fails, try Porteus, because that boots on everything, even on a non-standard SONY potato BIOS from 2002 
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Okay, I took a look at Lubuntu and while the documentation etc, is quite impressive there seems to be a few gaps in the installation instructions. Kubuntu looks like it might be somewhat easier to follow for such a complete newbie as myself! I was obviously spoilt previously by a simple Ubuntu install. Hopefully, I will be back in a few days.
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No need to feel bad about asking, that’s what we’re here for!
Kubuntu is a solid pick, the Calamares installer is much more forgiving than Ubuntu’s new one like @tkn mentioned. Before you go too deep into distro hopping though, a couple of quick things worth checking since you can get into the BIOS:
Also worth trying a different USB port, ideally a USB 2.0 one if the machine has any, since older boards sometimes get fussy booting from USB 3.
If you still hit a wall with Kubuntu, Linux Mint or Zorin Linux, are other easy distros with reliable installers. But with Kubuntu you’re on the right track.
Splitting this topic since the previous was already solved. Also for better visibility.
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If you are trying anything with “ancient” equipment, it is strongly recommended that you create a msdos partition table on the USB key first, then if you want, you can use the following to transfer the ISO image onto the USB key.
Once that is done, you can boot from that ISO image for the older PCs.
Once proviso: Some hardware definitions have been purged from the hardware database, because those managing the database feel that equipment does not have sufficient “in-use” instances to justify maintaining the database entries corresponding to those components.
I think they did that purging about 4-5 years ago.
That being the case, you could try to install an older ISO, then capture the hardware info and preserve that for the install of the newer ISO.
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I’m late to the party, but hopefully better late than never.
I don’t know what a HEPC is; search online only comes up with hep.c symptoms & causes so likely of no use.
I consider the hardware components myself, and still use devices as old as from 2003 here, and whilst most tend to focus on CPU & RAM; myself I consider the graphics/GPU more so.
I’ve found the older kernels tend to be easier for old graphics hardware, and for Ubuntu LTS releases, that means using an ISO that uses the GA kernel stack; flavors still using the default of Ubuntu Desktop ISOs of 18.04 & earlier; where Ubuntu Desktop changed defaults with 20.04, and Ubuntu Server changed its defaults in 26.04 - so release is first consideration, then ISO itself…
eg. I have Lubuntu 22.04 LTS media here with 5 different kernels, and actually have some hardware that will boot some of them (5.15 & 5.19) but not later ISOs (using 6.2, 6.5 or 6.8) for example… again slightly newer hardware that boots fine with 24.04 media using GA (6.8) but not any of the HWE kernels (6.11, 6.14, 6.17)
With the RAM, how old is is also matters; as all devices I’m using now that are 2003+ all have 1GB or more of RAM, thus installer matters less…
The oldest box on the desk (pre-2003 too) I’m sitting at now however only has 512MB of RAM which is TINY, and thus I’d need to use a Ubuntu ISO that didn’t operate live. In the years I’ve been involved with the Ubuntu project a total of 5 installers have been common, and only one of them fits that; ie. dI or the ancient debian installer. I’ve used it to install on devices with only 384MB of RAM. I doubt you’re using a box with <768MB of RAM where non-live is essential though (some newer installers need more than 1GB today too)
Next how the ISO is written to media can make a huge difference. The ISO as created will boot & install on legacy hardware (ie. pre-uEFI), older uEFI & modern uEFI with Secure-Boot enabled, but if you reformat the ISO you can make it fail to boot in one or more of those modes; or all of them if it’s a more modern ISO than the ISO writing software (which is reformatting the ISO) can correctly cope with… Tools like rufus are great, but their reformat options do require change when Ubuntu ISOs change, which can occur on all releases >20.04 by Ubuntu policy (before then architectures only differed; after 20.04 all architectures for the release boot the same; thus a amd64 ISO format can change as riscv64 or s390x mandates a change - this isn’t the case with many Ubuntu based distros that don’t create ISOs for many architectures)
Some hardware also isn’t great at following standards; so how patient are you?? I have a box here that starts to boot, then stops or really PAUSES, and that pause is longer than 10 minutes where nothing appears on screen & no code from ISO is running; the cpu is only stuck running bad code from the machine firmware that eventually exists & normal boot continues… but in those 10 minutes most users give up & try something else I bet… In that case you can write (reformat) the ISO so it doesn’t trigger the buggy code in the machine firmware, but that ISO will NOT boot on any other hardware; so its better to just wait… Were you patient enough? If you waited >60 minutes though; I doubt it’s a firmware bug…
Firmware bugs on booting external media are rarely fixed; as in most cases the device is SOLD with a pre-existing OS, so it’s only noted usually years later when device is no longer in production, and its often cheaper to just replace the one unit where a customer (still under warranty) complains; thus these bugs are more common than they should be (though thankfully still rare).
Did you verify ISO checksum pre-write? and verify the write to your install media was good??? Normally I do the latter by checking the self-checking in machine logs, where release dictates how this is done (you didn’t specify), but if it fails to boot you’ll need to do this on another machine anyway (I tend to boot & do the check on two different boxes if I have a problem).
Release, kernel stack, your hardware specs (esp. graphics), and how ISO is written can make a difference. Of course I always verify checksum & ensure the ISO was written correctly.
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As usual, Chris is a “Fount of Wisdom”, a well-versed immigrant from the old UbuntuMATE Discourse!
Thank you, Chris, for your abbreviated and in-depth overview of possible issues.
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As for hardware I have a working System 76 Darter Pro, but the part of the motherboard that controls the USB ports is toast. System 76 helped me diagnose that so it’s not just my opinion. It will work as long as it works but it won’t allow a new install, so basically it’s toast. And that laptop is only about 3 or 4 years old.
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Is there any remote chance that someone could pinpoint a replaceable component and be able to remove that (with soldering tools) and replace the dud at a reasonable price?
Or is that just an impossible pipe dream!
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Just as an aside; I had an old Thinkpad that I wanted to keep using for some Quality Assurance testing that no longer had working USB ports, and whilst I did replace them with non-original USB; the machine firmware wouldn’t boot from my replacement USB ports, and I sure didn’t want to re-write a DVDRW each time for testing (the device had a dvdrw).
I just modified the existing OS so the ISOs in a specific directory were added to the existing grub, allowing me to select (at grub) if I wanted to boot into an existing OS, or boot an ISO that existed on the HDD in a directory (those being added to grub menu by a script).. Whilst most of the testing I did on the device was live testing so no install was necessary (and I didn’t lose my scripts), I could also use it to install to another partition on the device and thus not overwrite my existing setup (meaning I didn’t have to recreate my configs to get around the non-bootable USB ports).
You may have other options.
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to guiverc and ericmarceau:
I just bought a refurbished HP laptop instead. I have had the best luck with new and refurbished HP laptops and the refurbished ones are about one third the price of new. I am not knocking System 76 but that laptop had multiple hardware problems from day one with causing crashes and freezes and I don’t want to stick another penny into it. It can happen with any product, you just get the lemon. I know two people that bought cars the company had to buy back under the lemon law.
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I have always had the highest regard for HP Computers (not Compact)! They have a culture of quality, which is inevitably a bit expensive, and they tend to stay away from most bells & whistles.
I’ve always hedged on buying refurbished, but if the refurbished item is from HP, I would definitely give that a close look when I go looking for a new one soon, but I would be looking for an HP OmniDesk Slim Desktop PC S03-0059, which is what I got for my wife last fall.
I would love to get the identical unit, cheaper (as a refurb?) so that I have the same equipment to be able to experiment and prove what needs to be done to allow proper manipulation of the bitlocker crap, without losing any of her data, so that I could get back to doing full backups the way I used to, by doing rsync from a Live ISO session.
Currently, I can’t bypass the darn bitlocker to be able to backup the system completely, and forced to use some crappy, partial backup using PowerShell. I can only really backup her profile, not the entire disk installation, which for me is a ticking time bomb! Her PC was brand spanking new and now modifications done to any of the UEFI or bitlocker crap, because I have not been able to inform myself to the degree of confidence that I wouldn’t “brick” her system.
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Oops, got my anagram screwed up! I meant HTPC, sorry. Anyway, the damned thing stopped without warning and refuses to restart. In addition, it sees the thumb drive with Ubuntu on it but won’t boot. I ran Memtest86 and it detected an enormous amount of errors. It’s old machine and has DDR3 (each 4Gb) memory. I swapped the memory sticks in all 4 slots and even tried different memory sticks, all with no change. I find it unusual that all 4 memory modules have failed or even that all 4 memory slots have also failed. As an amateur, I wonder if something else more terminal has occurred.
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Don’t forget, even good components will misbehave when fed bad power.
If I have any unusual behavior, the first check I usually make is the PSU (power supply unit), as no results are trustworthy if power isn’t correct (or within limits). RAM needs to be tested on other devices if you’re unsure power is ‘good’.
Power problems are often more evident when external devices are used (eg. USB port is used as plugged in devices take power), or DVD is in the tray (motor needs power to spin it) etc.
You’re wasting time exploring software problems if the hardware itself isn’t reliable.
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