Debian on Lenovo Chromebook (ARMv8)

[Thomas Uwe Grüttmüller <Sloyment@gmx.net>]

Hello everyone,

I recently bought a Chromebook with the intent to delete Chrome and
install Debian. I’m not talking about running Debian in a virtual
machine or chroot environment under ChromeOS, but booting directly into
it. The laptop is a
  Lenovo IdeaPad Flex3 CB 11M735,
and its processor is a
  MediaTek MT8173C (4 core ARMv8).

The problem is that instead of a normal BIOS or UEFI, thelaptop has the
nasty ChromeOS bootloader which refuses to boot the normal Debian ARM64
Netinst installer. The only thing it wants to boot from USB is the
ChromeOS recovery.

In theory, I could boot into ChromeOS from the eMMC, login as root and
copy Debian from the stick to the eMMC, but I don’t know how to
partition the eMMC. Where does the nasty bootloader expect to find
things? Can I make it boot into GRUB, or do I have to put the Linux
kernel from Debian onto a special partition? I’m completely clueless.

Thank you for any help :-)

Thomas