New Linux user requests guidance. Near boomer warning in effect.



@QuietQuintessence555 , may I ask how it is that you have changed to @AntrygWindrose since commencing this Thread?

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
You may. I had to do a quick reinstall the night before and in doing so I lost all of my automatically generated passwords. My phone is also on the blink or I could have recovered most of it. I sent Rob an explanation.
 
I understand, thanks for explaining :)

I'll leave your Thread back in the capable hands of our helpers, and Good luck (and welcome to linux.org)

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
AntrygWindrose said:
I am going to do another total wipe and update the bios as suggested. Even though I have done this before I had never unplugged the ssd before doing so and I also have never seen a button near any special port unless you mean the usb 3.1 and it has 2 tiny lit indentations 1 which is on constantly and the other flashes. I do have a few other questions besides the buttons however.

Machine: HP-15dy1031wm , Intel Ice lake i3 1005G1 processor, SK hynix BC511 HFM256GDJTNI-82A0A SSD, RTL8821CE 802.11ac PCIe Wireless Network Adapter, 12GB memory
Ah, it's a notebook, that explains a lot. Laptops sadly don't generally have an "easy" manual way to flash the BIOS. The button I mentioned is only really found on the I/O panel of desktop PC motherboards. Sorry, I thought it was a desktop PC. Anyway, for your notebook, it looks like the f'krs at HP don't provide you a UEFI executable or any ROM files directly. I don't want to risk you bricking your machine, so I'd rather suggest you follow their instructions as per the "manual, outside Windows" method, except once you have the update flashdrive, get another one to boot Linux from after flashing the firmware. This appears to be your model's drivers/firmware page.

AntrygWindrose said:
1, Will doing the bios as suggested completely remove Windows from the system?
2. Do the bios update and reinstall downloads absolutely have to be done on a pure linux machine?
3. Do I need to download the bios from somewhere besides hp support since windows came with the machine?
4. Best place for safe linux os downloads?
5. Since the ssd is guid partitioned do I need to mess with new tables or types?
1. No. It won't remove the OS(es) or bootloader. This is to "clean" and update your BIOS/Firmware to ensure nothing is faulty.
2. No. I just suggested it as an option if you were concerned that your system had been rendered unusable at firmware level (you said you could not access the BIOS properly).
3. No. See my answer in the section above this. HP has the firmware ROM. You should only download software/firmware from your OEM unless you know exactly what you're doing and the risks it incurs - which are an unfortunate side-effect of the notebook ecosystem (with a desktop PC, you have access to each hardware component yourself, thus you get BIOS updates from your board manufacturer and they work from the UEFI and on most modern boards, straight from the USB BIOS Update port -- which acts as a normal USB port the rest of the time).
4. Best place is their official websites. You should stick to this. There are plenty of other places, probably Softpedia-type places, but it's always best to go to the official site, which provides a trusted download and a checksum. If you can't find your distro's home page for whatever reason Distro Watch lists almost everything Linux or BSD and their websites.
5. No*, most distros are pretty user-friendly and will ask you what you want and figure out the best option. If you want a completely fresh and Windows-free start, you'll have to wipe all partitions (including the OEM recovery one). These kinds of options will be asked by most installers.
*That said, if you want to optimize something or setup a feature, it's very easy to manually partition a disk. My advice for beginners for a day-to-day use is 60GB for /, 16GB swap, and the rest for /home.
 
You may. I had to do a quick reinstall the night before and in doing so I lost all of my automatically generated passwords. My phone is also on the blink or I could have recovered most of it. I sent Rob an explanation.
You could have done a password reset, I would think you could still get into your e-mail account?
 
You could have done a password reset, I would think you could still get into your e-mail account?

Well, in all fairness, they did warn us that they're a 'boomer'!

I kid... I kid... Quite a few of us here are boomers.
 
Well, in all fairness, they did warn us that they're a 'boomer'!

I kid... I kid... Quite a few of us here are boomers.
Thats ok. I have a healthy sense of humor. Before I post replies to others I would like to thank everyone for helping.
 
You could have done a password reset, I would think you could still get into your e-mail account?
Actually my emailacct was intended to be temporary so it was not double verified and PW for it was also autogenerated. Ouch. Probably could have made some calls but was to eager to vent.
 
Ah, it's a notebook, that explains a lot. Laptops sadly don't generally have an "easy" manual way to flash the BIOS. The button I mentioned is only really found on the I/O panel of desktop PC motherboards. Sorry, I thought it was a desktop PC. Anyway, for your notebook, it looks like the f'krs at HP don't provide you a UEFI executable or any ROM files directly. I don't want to risk you bricking your machine, so I'd rather suggest you follow their instructions as per the "manual, outside Windows" method, except once you have the update flashdrive, get another one to boot Linux from after flashing the firmware. This appears to be your model's drivers/firmware page.


1. No. It won't remove the OS(es) or bootloader. This is to "clean" and update your BIOS/Firmware to ensure nothing is faulty.
2. No. I just suggested it as an option if you were concerned that your system had been rendered unusable at firmware level (you said you could not access the BIOS properly).
3. No. See my answer in the section above this. HP has the firmware ROM. You should only download software/firmware from your OEM unless you know exactly what you're doing and the risks it incurs - which are an unfortunate side-effect of the notebook ecosystem (with a desktop PC, you have access to each hardware component yourself, thus you get BIOS updates from your board manufacturer and they work from the UEFI and on most modern boards, straight from the USB BIOS Update port -- which acts as a normal USB port the rest of the time).
4. Best place is their official websites. You should stick to this. There are plenty of other places, probably Softpedia-type places, but it's always best to go to the official site, which provides a trusted download and a checksum. If you can't find your distro's home page for whatever reason Distro Watch lists almost everything Linux or BSD and their websites.
5. No*, most distros are pretty user-friendly and will ask you what you want and figure out the best option. If you want a completely fresh and Windows-free start, you'll have to wipe all partitions (including the OEM recovery one). These kinds of options will be asked by most installers.
*That said, if you want to optimize something or setup a feature, it's very easy to manually partition a disk. My advice for beginners for a day-to-day use is 60GB for /, 16GB swap, and the rest for /home.
As should be apparent I am on a different system now. The reason is that I not only purposely bricked it (it was intended to be short term) but somehow or another a computer that light which I had even dropped in the past with no damage has its screen shatter right as I opened it. Computer cost originally was almost 500. A new screen was in the 250 range. I just bought an older sturdy model from the repair shop plus he bought my m2 ssd from the old one.

It is Windows pro for now until I stabilize my accounts then I will probably make it a dual boot system. I have since been informed that many of my former problems were due to netbios settings (I personally do not know) but It does appear that even my new machine shares the same i.p and links to a named computer even when I do not hook up to a network. Anyway the adventure continues but I am through chasing it for fun. I wasted 9 months trying to figure out if I knew who or what was doing this and I learned a lot but I thinkl I will turn it over to pros to solve. Thanks to all of you for your assistance.
 

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