Getting Linux onto my Laptop

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dormindo

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Hello all. I have an HP laptop which started having trouble a week ago--going into a cyclical boot pattern that would never complete the boot. I would get a message saying that the hive file could not be recovered. I had a friend try to reinstall Vsta for me, but to no avail as the disk he had was not deemed genuine. Where I stand right now is with a laptop with a partial install of Vista (it will boot to the welcome/password page but will ask for a genuine code once I enter my password).

What I'd like to know is: is there a way to get a bootable version of the Linux operating system onto my flash/usb/pendrive, get my laptop to boot the usb drive and install linux onto my laptop? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
 


Hello all. I have an HP laptop which started having trouble a week ago--going into a cyclical boot pattern that would never complete the boot. I would get a message saying that the hive file could not be recovered. I had a friend try to reinstall Vsta for me, but to no avail as the disk he had was not deemed genuine. Where I stand right now is with a laptop with a partial install of Vista (it will boot to the welcome/password page but will ask for a genuine code once I enter my password).

What I'd like to know is: is there a way to get a bootable version of the Linux operating system onto my flash/usb/pendrive, get my laptop to boot the usb drive and install linux onto my laptop? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

what you probably can do is download a distro that will run in your laptop. if you know its specs then sure you can find which linux distro will run on it. Burn its .iso file to a CD or if it don't have a CD, then you might just wanna buy a pendrive which has linux on it, there are lots of it for sale.
 
Your laptop will likely run any of the leading Linux distributions, but if you've never used Linux you will probably find that Ubuntu or Linux Mint are the easiest ones to install and run. If you go to Ubuntu.com, you'll find simple instructions on how to download Ubuntu and put it on a usb drive, then boot it and install it. If you can't get access to a computer to do that, check out osdisk.com, where you can buy a usb drive with Ubuntu for about $10.
 
If you can access a working Windows computer, you can use Linux Live USB Creator (LiLi) http://www.linuxliveusb.com/ to download and create a bootable Linux USB flash drive that will also let you install. Give Linux Mint a try.

For your Vista problem, have you tried entering the license key that is on the bottom of your laptop? Assuming, that is, that it had Vista to start with.

Also, you may have a recovery partition, if your friend did not wipe it out with the re-installation. You should have booted to that partition and used it to fix or reinstall Windows instead of using a fresh install from a disk. You would have had all the drivers and probably not have needed to enter a key. Now, if you do get Vista to work, you will have to hunt down the drivers for your laptop to get everything working.
 
Off topic a bit, but it doesn't give you the option of entering a key later? Usually Windows at least gives you 30 days before complaining about not having a valid license, which is generally plenty of time to find your original key and validate it, or find a decent 'workaround' if you can't.
 

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