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Laptop Installation Options with no USB or CD/DVD boot options

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    Laptop Installation Options with no USB or CD/DVD boot options

    Good evening

    Our high school Physics department has recently been given a pile of EOL Toshiba Tecra A11 laptops that have been redeployed and scrapped from elsewhere in the education service. With budget cuts having decimated our access to IT for classroom teaching we are planning to rebuild as many as we can and since we can't continue to use the original corporate Windows builds we would like to rebuild them around Kubuntu.

    As technician I have been given the job of making this happen and the first snag I have hit is that the machines all have a non-standard BIOS that disables any power-on access options of any kind and locks out booting from anything other than the HDD. I had planned to build the first machine by booting from a USB flash drive and then cloning the completed build but that will not be possible.

    My only experience of core builds has been from CD/DVD or USB pen drive, never directly from the HDD. If I put the image onto a HDD and install it onto the laptop, will it bootstrap the installation? I have seen that done with some deployments but I know that very much depends on how the individual build and boot is handled.

    Additionally, my partitioning application does not support EXT4 and I am limited at present to NTFS or EXT3. Is EXT3 a problem for Kubuntu?

    Any insight on any of the above issues would be gratefully received.

    Regards, Frazer

    #2
    Without that I'm not too sure what you could do. I can say I would take another machine that is somewhat similar and place the hard drive in it and install. Then place in the Toshiba. I've done similar before when I've had issues of some type or other that wouldn't allow proper boot. Linux has always been fairly resilient with me doing this. The Kernel is good at recognizing what is used with a machine. I just make sure they appear comparable, mostly processor maker.

    So I did search for similar issues and this link, which you may have already found, http://aps2.toshiba-tro.de/kb0/trash...32D0000R01.HTM; has some interesting ways to get in HOWEVER it means these PCs you have were locked down with an Admin password that hides that BIOS entry point. They charge to have that password removed. It might be worth the effort to ask those who maintained them if they know that password. Long shot I know but thought I relay that.
    Last edited by MoonRise; Sep 28, 2019, 06:31 PM.

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      #3
      Can you get to the BIOS at all? It might be worthwhile trying to get into one machine to see if it will allow a re-set of the BIOS. I've not owned a Tecra, but I did find this. Maybe you've tried this already or some other way to get to the BIOS for an update or a BIOS version fallback. Otherwise, you'd have to install to a hard drive using a different but similar laptop, then installing the drive and updating your way to operation. There may also be a way to download an ISO file to the drive and try to boot from it to install. I've never done that, either. Somehow, you need to get a standard BIOS on at least one machine so you can at least have options.
      The next brick house on the left
      Intel i7 11th Gen | 16GB | 1TB | KDE Plasma 5.24.7 | Kubuntu 22.04.4 | 6.5.0-18-generic

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        #4
        Thanks for the replies. I was hoping for an easy solution or to at least find a back door to the BIOS. As luck would have it we found one unlocked machine so I have been able to build on that and we should be able to clone from there.

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          #5
          Glad to hear they had one unlocked. Cloning the drive should work on the others. Hate that you can't get the passcode for the others.

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            #6
            Glad to hear that!
            The next brick house on the left
            Intel i7 11th Gen | 16GB | 1TB | KDE Plasma 5.24.7 | Kubuntu 22.04.4 | 6.5.0-18-generic

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