Can't install Fedora on older PC

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Edit: So I had a deeper look at everything, I already have my motherboards latest bios, F7. I realised, thanks to a commenter that USB-HDD was what I was looking for to boot from USB. Unfortunately this change still left me with the hang on the ‘Loading Operating System’ screen.

Another commenter mentioned ‘Secure Boot’, from my research, my motherboard is a few years too old to have it, but it has something more insidious (at least if the general consensus from the era is to be believed), ‘Boot Guard’. Hopefully I can find a way around this issue :skull:

I haven’t tried everything other commenters have mentioned yet, but I figured I’d document my experience for possible future information seekers. Which seems crazy given how old this PC is (not that anyone asked, this isn’t my main, by you’d be forgiven for thinking that), but given the current state of the PC enthusiast market, or even just the PC market in general, I feel that more than a few people will be hanging on to their ‘ancient’ tech for a little while longer :smiling_face_with_tear:

Hi there,

I have an older computer that I want to convert to Linux, as it is on Win10pro and doesn’t have tpm2.0. The specs for it are:

Intel i7 880
Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H Micro ATX LGA1156 Motherboard
Patriot Viper 3 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3-1600 CL9 Memory
AMD HD7950 (I’m going to put my old RX580 8gb in there)

So after a little bit of research, it seemed that Fedora Xfce (v43) would be the option for this PC. I downloaded it (from fedoraproject.org), used FMW to create the bootable USB and verified it. The bios on this PC doesn’t have a ‘flash drive’ boot option, it only has USB-ZIP, I figured that should pretty much be the same thing, but I also added ZIP and USB-CD-ROM as back up boot options. The first time I tried, it just booted straight up into Win10. Then when I tried again on the boot screen it said that apparently there was a fault from overclocking and was reset to default timings, I’ve never OC’d anything on this computer. Then when it booted again, it got to the ‘Loading Operating System’ screen and just hung there for about 10 minutes. So I turned the pc off, tried recreating the boot usb, but FMW told me that the flash drive was unusable and told me to use other tools to fix it. After some more googling, I found RUFUS and used that to fix it and create the boot drive. Same issues happened again. I went back to RUFUS tried again but this time writing in DD mode. Same problem again. Then I decided to just try KDE 43, and I’ve again had the same problem both as normal write and DD write.

So, my question is, am I the idiot here? Am I missing some important step? From what I can see I’ve followed the directions on how to install. From what I can see it should be a breeze; plug in bootable USB, boot from USB … profit. But that’s not happening here.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me!

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I don’t know if your computer has Secure Boot or not, I would look into it because it has given me problems in the past to boot Linux. Enter BIOS and disable Secure Boot if you have one enabled. And I don’t think changing Fedora desktop environment is going to change whether you can boot or not, it should only change how fast your computer is. XFCE is a good choice.

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Don’t, unless you are planning to use only the nouveau drivers for that GPU.
The modern nvidia drivers do not support that older GPU, and even the older nvidia drivers that do support it will not work with wayland.

As long as you do not need hardware acceleration for graphics that gpu should work with the nouveau driver and wayland, but do not expect any outstanding performance from it.

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I’ve been looking, and it seems I don’t have secure boot in my bios (it’s the old school one, not uefi. At least I assume? It says award software 1984 - 2010, and by the look of it, secure boot came out in 2012?) I don’t know if it’s maybe I need to update my chipset drivers, or flash the bios, I guess I’ll have a look at that as well. If none of that works, I’ll try a different distro. Thanks for the input!

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Hey Jeff!

Not sure what nouveau drivers are, but the RX 580 is an AMD card. I’ll keep that in mind if I decide to put an NVIDIA card in there at all though.

Thanks!

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Anyway check bios boot options some old bios can change place for boot if yes then change to first place usb and save settings .Try like that to boot liveusb .Once you install don’t forget go to bios and change place to hdd and save it.

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Sorry, I misread that and thought it was an nvidia GPU. My bad.

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Maybe you need to update the BIOS. The manual claims “USB-HDD”:

First/Second/Third Boot Device
Specifies the boot order from the available devices. Use the up or down arrow key to select a device
and press to accept. Options are: Floppy, LS120, Hard Disk, CDROM, ZIP, USB-FDD, USB-ZIP,
USB-CDROM, USB-HDD, Legacy LAN, Disabled.

(from: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-H55M-S2H-rev-10)

Also, you have a non-EFI/UEFI/secureboot/fancy video drivers (or mbr/gpt/BIOS) peecee. You got Old Skool. Your RX 580 is a GCN 4.0/Polaris 20 (the generational series) card, so that is supported out-of-box with Fedora. You don’t need anything special or extra to boot up the Live ISO. It Should Just Work. So no, there’s no idiots there. :wink:

Does the USB show up in the F12 Quick Boot menu? If you don’t see it, then that’s something to fix. If you do see it, check your BIOS version for an update.

You should see this (the USB key to boot from it) or set this in the BIOS boot screen. Because this setup is Old Skool, I’d assume that you would infact have to come here and tell the BIOS what to do. That’s how this was done back-in-the-day…

image
image1189×657 68.7 KB

It wouldn’t surprise me based on the release date of your mobo that a BIOS update might help. Back then, USB key booting was like living in The Highrise…

Best of luck.

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It looks like the USB drive is not being registered for the boot.
In addition to seeing if a BIOS update can fix that, are you able to install Fedora to a Hard Drive in another computer, and then move that drive to the one you want it on?

Otherwise, if CDROM booting is supported, you could go that route. CD burners are about 20-30 monetary units. However, a USB CDROM might not be recognised at boot either - so you would need the IDE or SATA version …

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As said above, if you have a DVD reader and manage to find a DVD to buy then burn the ISO to it, it works. Otherwise back in the day we used Plop Boot Manager to boot from USB. It could be installed from Windows.
Then if you manage to install Fedora, you can add Plop to GRUB’s menu to be able to boot from USB when needed.

Edit: there’s a development version for Plop that should work pretty easily for you:

Check “Instructions for Windows Vista/7/8/10” in that page.

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Looks like the last BIOS update was in 2010. Might as well update to the latest version if you don’t have it, but probably don’t expect anything revolutionary.

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https://linux-hardware.org/?computer=e507f8f9d72b shows 3 probes for systems running linux on Gigabyte H55M-S2 systems. All 3 are using the 2010 BIOS.

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Hey Rallen!

Thanks for the info. Now that you have said USB-HDD that makes a lot more sense (so maybe I am a bit of an idiot :sweat_smile:

I followed your instructions and I am still met with the same hang on the Loading Operating System… screen. After a little bit of digging after another commenter mentioned ‘secure boot’, my cpu doesn’t have that, but there is something called ‘boot guard’, which, from what I’ve seen was the bane of a lot of people existence back then. Hopefully this isn’t my issue, but I’ll find out I guess.

I appreciate the help, thanks!

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Hey Igor!

Thank you for that! I figured out I was confused by the old bios ‘language’ and chose the wrong boot option, I wanted ‘USB-HDD’. Unfortunately though this did not help. SO back to the drawing board! But yes, I will keep that in mind if I ever get it installed! :sweat_smile:

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Hey MatH!

Yeah, thanks to another commenter, I realised I got confused by the older bios ‘language’ and I needed my first boot option to be ‘USB-HDD’, not ‘USB-ZIP’. Unfortunately this did not change my predicament. I also had the latest bios update, previous me must have updated it when I got the 880 (like 4 or 5 years ago).

As for installing on another computer, I suppose I could, though that is an option my ADHD is baulking at right now :sweat_smile: that might be a last ditch attempt, especially if this ‘Boot Guard’ end up being the gremlin causing all my problems.

I do have a bonafide cd drive installed on that PC, so I might give that a shot if I can find a blank cd :thinking:

Thank you for your input, it’s much appreciated!

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Hey Sergio!

Thank you, I think that might be my next step. As you seem to be one of the OG’s of Linux installations from back then, I found that my CPU has ‘Boot Guard’ on there, and from what I’ve read, it was a real headache to bypass (apparently sometimes requiring physical intervention). Will Plop Boot Manager help me get around this, if that is what is causing my problems, or, will I have to go the long route another commenter mentioned, by installing it on a hard drive on another PC and transferring the hard drive to the old pc? I will try using the cd/dvd route and Plop in the meantime.

Thank you for your input, it’s much appreciated!

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Hey P G!

Yeah, I double checked and had the latest bios installed already. Thank you for your input!

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Hey George!

Thanks for sharing this! That’s good to know, although it’s unfortunate that they are all only ubuntu systems. Maybe if I exhaust all options with Fedora, I’ll have to just switch to ubuntu.

Thanks!

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If Fedora won’t install, chances that current Ubuntu can be installed are slim. Some older machines can be made to run recent Linux kernels by upgrading from the latest kernel that does install, and there are workarounds like installing on a newer system and swapping the drive to an older system. One complication with older machines is that hardware faults may be blocking installs.

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All good, Jeff!