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 
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 
Edit 2: Apologies for not updating sooner, this ended up being more of a headache and once I had it sorted, I needed some distance from the whole thing before I came back to here 
I tried the Plop program and while it installed and work on the computer, it didn’t do the job for me. I don’t know enough to say what the actual issue there was, but YMMV.
CD-ROM ended up being the fix for me. It worked first time. Where the headaches started for me was the fact that I second guessed myself. I knew that I had to install it on the first drive, I can’t remember if it had drive codes or anything, I thing I might have just been too fried from the whole experience to look properly and I just wanted it done (thanks ADHD).
So what ended up happening was, when it showed me the drive options to install, it said ‘Windows’ on the second drive. I was confused at first, but I thought that maybe it was just a fact of Linux reading the drives differently, so I chose that drive instead. It all seemed to go great. Afterwards when I booted it back up, it loaded into Windows again! I logged in and checked the hard drives and sure enough, the second hard drive was where it installed. I can’t remember what that looked like. Either it didn’t show the hard drive in explorer, or it just said it couldn’t be read. It was something along those lines. SIGH.
So I started the process again and installed it on the first hard drive that I was going to in the first place. Everything went well this time. I logged in and figured all I’d have to do now was format the second hard drive to make it a normal storage drive again. So after some more time figuring out how to do anything in Linux, I finally found what I was looking for and then after more time of working through the process, I finally formatted it. BUT THEN…
I couldn’t use the hard drive still! After another sickening amount of time and multiple trouble shooting sessions, I finally figured out that all I had to do was (again I’m going of memory here, so I might be wrong) something as simple as right clicking the hard drive in the explorer window and clicking mount drive? It might not have been exactly that, but I remember it being a maddeningly simple solution that seemed stupidly obvious lol.
After I figured that out and did some basic playing with settings, I haven’t touched it for about 2 or 3 weeks. It might still be a while until I go back to it lol. I didn’t even want to come back and do this update to be honest but I know how frustrating it can be finding threads like this that are incomplete because the OP found their solution and decided to keep their secrets. But anyway, there is my story. Hopefully my pain and frustration can help someone else in the future. Thanks again to everyone in the comments who helped me get here, it’s much appreciated.
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!
