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Re: Big problem




On 10/16/25 10:27 AM, Bigsy Bohr wrote:
On 2025-10-15, Maureen L Thomas <silverorb@verizon.net> wrote:
A friend of mine bought a refurbished computer.  It is an all in one 
ThinkCenter by Lenova.  I have changed settings in the CMOS so that the 
USB would show up first.  Nothing that I have done works.  It just says 
no files to load and I tried many times.  It is an older computer and it 
weights a ton.  Can anyone tell me how to get Linux on this machine.  
Since I did not buy this one I have no idea what is inside of it.  Hope 
some knows how to get around this problem.


I refurbished my machine (put in extra RAM, a network card, and an SSD)
and tried to boot from the debian 13 netinstall iso I'd written to a USB
dongle previously (when I was using the machine with spinning rust on
Debian 12). It wouldn't boot from the dongle. Something about wrong
magic number, which is juicy slice of explicit, concrete information that's
absent from your post.

To put it briefly, I went up to the Leclerc shopping center up the road
and bought another USB dongle as well as an OTG cable (as I'd downloaded
the Debian iso to my phone). I wrote the Trixie netinstall to my new USB drive
with EtchDroid. It booted (you must choose plain old USB rather than EFI
USB to use a legacy BIOS). I think my BIOS is really too legacy for my
own good.

At any rate, LXDE is snappy (but adding apps to the panel crashed twice,
leaving me with a screen blanker than some minds---no menu, no taskbar,
no xterm, no nothing). Come to think of it, I should've alt-F2 or three
or four and gotten to the console to kill this or that or reboot. But I
didn't. There is an upper row of keys above the upper row of keys on my
keyboard and one of them is mapped miraculously correctly (Z'). It puts
the machine into a half-dormant state from which it awakens at the lightdm
login screen, and from there, you can reboot.

Your post lacks the necessary detail for assistance.
OK You guys need an explanation.  The person who bought this machine knows almost nothing about computers, how they work, or what is in side of them.  He has finally gotten the password from AOL which took 2 damn days, but he got it.  It put it in and now the damn thing is running windows.  I am going to make a copy of the CMOS so you know exactly what is in this thing.  I know from looking at it that something is not quite right.  I have moved the DVD to the top of the boot list and it ignores the drive completly and loads Windows 10.  I will get back to you tomorrow when I get the picture.

    

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