yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven’t had it since like 2021
but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I’m gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!
Nice. Just do your best not to fall back on Windows too quickly. Really try to do everything on the laptop first. Except for work. If something isn’t working just do it on Windows and move on in that case.
i’m probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but
something weird happened.
i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.
it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.
well… it got to the point where it said “hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation”
okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there’s anything in this windows instance that I still want.
so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i’d want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick
… nope.
it says ‘something has gone terribly wrong’ and ‘failed to load UEFI’ or something
but that’s not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch
that’s all background stuff, here’s the important crazy thing:
the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.
EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT’S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES
This happens sometimes. You flashed it in a way that makes Windows not recognize the full drive. Usually happens with dd flashing or Rufus’ dd flash mode. I can’t remember what tool I usually use to fix my USB sticks, but there will be a way.
Also, just in case, check the computer’s Secure Boot settings in case something changed that won’t let the USB boot anymore.
it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn’t even try dd flash mode at first.
what’s crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!
I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said “ohhhh no you fucking don’t, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!”
yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven’t had it since like 2021
but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I’m gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!
Nice. Just do your best not to fall back on Windows too quickly. Really try to do everything on the laptop first. Except for work. If something isn’t working just do it on Windows and move on in that case.
Good luck.
… okay so uh
i’m probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but
something weird happened.
i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.
it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.
well… it got to the point where it said “hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation”
okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there’s anything in this windows instance that I still want.
so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i’d want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick
… nope.
it says ‘something has gone terribly wrong’ and ‘failed to load UEFI’ or something
but that’s not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch
that’s all background stuff, here’s the important crazy thing:
the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.
EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT’S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES
the linux mint iso can’t even FIT on it now
i can’t even reflash it
i … but … how do i even …
WAT
This happens sometimes. You flashed it in a way that makes Windows not recognize the full drive. Usually happens with
ddflashing or Rufus’ddflash mode. I can’t remember what tool I usually use to fix my USB sticks, but there will be a way.Also, just in case, check the computer’s Secure Boot settings in case something changed that won’t let the USB boot anymore.
it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn’t even try dd flash mode at first.
what’s crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!
I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said “ohhhh no you fucking don’t, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!”