Posted: 6/17/2026 8:43:33 PM EDT
[Last Edit: eolian][Edited]
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Old HP laptop HP 6460b I5 with 4gb of ram 512 gb of disk. Windows 10. I put linux Mint on a thumb drive. Used it a couple of weeks and liked it. Did an install on the hard drive. Erased windows and told it to do a Mint only install. Laptop wont boot from the hard drive runs fine from the thumb drive. Checked bios hard drive is first. The thumb drive install is fun to play with but i need Mint to boot from the drive or its useless to me. Any ideas? |
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Some of those older laptops were designed to work with Windows and only Windows so you have to modify a couple of things to get the BIOS to recognize the Mint bootloader. It basically only looks for the Windows bootloader. Try these steps Boot into the Linux Mint Live USB. Open a terminal and run lsblk to identify the drive's EFI partition (it will usually be a small 100MB-500MB FAT32 partition, like /dev/sda1). Mount that partition. They can use the Disks utility in Mint, or via terminal: sudo mkdir /mnt/efi sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/efi (replace sda1 with the actual partition) Navigate to the mounted directory: cd /mnt/efi/EFI They will likely see an ubuntu folder. They need to create a Boot folder (if it doesn't exist) and copy the bootloader into it: sudo mkdir Boot sudo cp ubuntu/grubx64.efi Boot/bootx64.efi Unmount, reboot, and remove the USB. The HP BIOS should now see the fallback file and load GRUB. |
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Was one of the steps to delete the existing partitions on the drive? Lots of the bigger name company (HP, Dell, etc.) laptops keep a hidden windows "restore" partition with their windows install version on it. Try the install again but find the section for deleting _all_ the existing partitions and then making one single partition for Linux to live in. (If Mint needs some, it will ask or just create them.) I did the same thing you are doing, used Mint for a couple weeks with a USB stick sticking out the side. Once the printer, bluetooth, wireless and all the inputs were known working I just wiped what was on the laptop and did native install. It has a few quirks and is (duh) different than Windows but I take it on trips and so on without feeling like I should have brought a Windows laptop. |
Mercy on the criminal is cruelty to the innocent.
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I believe i have it now. Chatgpt fixed it by photos. Thank you for the replies. Gpt says this laptop was built during a transition in legacy and efi. That was the problem. I had to point grub to the correct efi partition. “ after i found out where it was” The strangest thing. Under windows my battery was dead. Would not run 5 min until it died. Under mint its like new. 2 hrs battery life? |
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Originally Posted By eolian: I believe i have it now. Chatgpt fixed it by photos. Thank you for the replies. Gpt says this laptop was built during a transition in legacy and efi. That was the problem. I had to point grub to the correct efi partition. “ after i found out where it was” The strangest thing. Under windows my battery was dead. Would not run 5 min until it died. Under mint its like new. 2 hrs battery life? Was the Win10 load an OEM load, or was it upgraded from Win8? If the latter, the drivers for power management could've been an issue. |
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Originally Posted By cruze5: battery meters are deceiving now if you saying the laptop would turn off in windows. and in mint it runs for 2 hours, thats totally different and unreal welcome to getting out of microsoft Yes as a test i fully charged it to 100% and ran it until it died. The battery is a small one but it went almost 4 hrs surfing and running wire shark to see what kind of wifi traffic was happening around me. Im am quite pleased with the install. |