My mother-in-law gave me an old Toshiba laptop that she said Geek Squad claimed was fried. She bought a new laptop, and this is mine if I can get it to work. In her words, it won't turn on.
It is a Toshiba Satellite, with 4 gb of ram and about a 170 gb hitachi hard drive. It has a Turion 64 X2 processor running at 1.6 GHz.
When I turned it on, it tried to go into a recovery mode, but that was useless because I didn't have recovery disks. And, we didn't need anything she had on it anyway.
I didn't want to put Windows 7/10 on it for obvious reasons - it wouldn't be the speediest machine in the world. My first thought was to boot to a USB drive with Ubuntu, so I put the current version of Ubuntu on it and gave it a try.
It wouldn't boot up, wouldn't boot to the DVD drive, and then I found BIOS didn't even have an option to boot to a USB drive. I couldn't even get it to boot to the DVD I had of Windows 7. So, then I pulled the hard drive, stuck it into my PC and formatted it, then put it back in the laptop. Now it will boot using the Windows 7 disk I had, so I installed Windows, then I put the Ubuntu ISO on the recovery partition, then used EasyBCD to create a boot entry to boot from the ISO on the extra partition. It started to boot, but I'm getting an error that causes a hard stop: MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
When I hit F6 I get an option to select "noapic" and several other options, but an attempt with noapic didn't help. I don't have a command line option in EasyBCD, so I'm pretty limited.
My next thought is to go get a DVD-R (I didn't have any at home) and put the ISO on that and try it. Some people in the Ubuntu forums say the error was solved booting from a DVD over a USB or HDD.
Should that work, or would I be better off looking for an earlier version of Ubuntu, or a different Linux build altogether? I've got very limited experience in Linux but I was hoping to learn a bit with this laptop, but its kind of frustrating to run into problems so quickly.
It is a Toshiba Satellite, with 4 gb of ram and about a 170 gb hitachi hard drive. It has a Turion 64 X2 processor running at 1.6 GHz.
When I turned it on, it tried to go into a recovery mode, but that was useless because I didn't have recovery disks. And, we didn't need anything she had on it anyway.
I didn't want to put Windows 7/10 on it for obvious reasons - it wouldn't be the speediest machine in the world. My first thought was to boot to a USB drive with Ubuntu, so I put the current version of Ubuntu on it and gave it a try.
It wouldn't boot up, wouldn't boot to the DVD drive, and then I found BIOS didn't even have an option to boot to a USB drive. I couldn't even get it to boot to the DVD I had of Windows 7. So, then I pulled the hard drive, stuck it into my PC and formatted it, then put it back in the laptop. Now it will boot using the Windows 7 disk I had, so I installed Windows, then I put the Ubuntu ISO on the recovery partition, then used EasyBCD to create a boot entry to boot from the ISO on the extra partition. It started to boot, but I'm getting an error that causes a hard stop: MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC
When I hit F6 I get an option to select "noapic" and several other options, but an attempt with noapic didn't help. I don't have a command line option in EasyBCD, so I'm pretty limited.
My next thought is to go get a DVD-R (I didn't have any at home) and put the ISO on that and try it. Some people in the Ubuntu forums say the error was solved booting from a DVD over a USB or HDD.
Should that work, or would I be better off looking for an earlier version of Ubuntu, or a different Linux build altogether? I've got very limited experience in Linux but I was hoping to learn a bit with this laptop, but its kind of frustrating to run into problems so quickly.