Now my P750DM-G will post, but won't boot?

So I've gotten my new laptop put together, minus the WiFi card (waiting for it to arrive from Newegg in a few days). But, I'm unable to get it to boot. It says "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key".

I tried booting it off a 32GB SD card (that I used YUMI to put several Linux distros on, formatted as FAT32), plugged into one of the USB ports. That didn't work in the laptop, but my desktop could boot from it using the boot selection menu.

I then put the laptop HDD in my desktop, copied the partition from the SD card to the HDD, then added a few other partitions (144GiB ext4, 64GiB swap and the rest, about 1.7+ TB, NTFS for data). I was able to boot that 2 TB drive in my desktop, but first I had to unplug my main boot 256GB SSD.

Put the 2TB drive back in the laptop....same error message. What gives? Why can I boot the hard drive and SD card on my desktop PC, but not in my laptop?

I'm noticing in the bios that the SATA drive is either on SATA Port 2 (if I put it in the place where @HTWingNut's HDD is on his P750DM-G video review), or SATA Port 3 if I use the other bay. I'm hoping I don't have to boot off of SATA Port 0? I really wasn't planning to buy an SSD until I also upgrade to the Kaby Lake i7-7xxxK, upgrade to 64GB of RAM, buy Windows 10 Pro (or enterprise), and upgrade to the GTX 1195M or something like that. Okay I probably wouldn't wait THAT long but I was thinking at least 6 months to a year before I put a 480-512GB M.2 SSD in. I've already gone over budget for now, and I'm still planning to get a case. A few I'm considering from Fry's are the Inland 02450, Case Logic ZLC-216 (Black), Case Logic VNCI-215 (Black), Case Logic VNAI-215 (Black), and Case Logic AUA-316 (Black). Another one I see on Newegg that may be considered, if I can find it locally, is the Targus TCT027US.

I really need to get this up and running before my Christmas weekend trip, and I'm leaving probably as early as 7-9am next Thursday. It was my main purpose for buying the laptop when I did, and I do intend to keep it for several years so yes it will get use beyond this weekend.

 

Be aware this system uses a UEFI bios structure and is set to use UEFI as default so any boot device must be compatible with it.

 

I'm aware of that, @Meaker. I'm puzzled as to why the drive will boot in my desktop PC (which is also UEFI enabled, and I don't think I can test disabling it cause I believe Windows 10 requires it), but not in the laptop.

I did test disabling UEFI in the laptop's bios. It did change the boot splash screen somewhat (logo was full screen at lower resolution, also told me the keys to use for entering setup or selecting boot options (it was F7 though, whereas on my desktop it's F11)), and also mentioned the Intel PXE-2.0, Qualcomm Atheros PCIE Ethernet controller, etc, but still gave me the same boot error message.

I reboot again, press F7, select the hard drive .... "Reboot and Select proper Boot device".

Why is it doing that? That same hard drive boots just fine on my desktop PC, and both are UEFI. (The desktop PC has an ASRock Z97 Extreme6 mobo, btw.)

One thing I was just noticing on the boot screen was "Check cable connection! PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM." Could that have anything to do with it, or is that only for the PCI-Express drive interface?

I *REALLY* don't want to get an SSD unless I can get one for under $30 (current price of a Sandisk Extreme 32GB USB drive), but I'm starting to wonder if booting off of SATA Port 0 is required?


Do I need to just buy a TB worth of UHS class 3 SD cards, so I have a place to put my 4K videos I'll be recording over Christmas weekend? I really don't have the spare almost-$500 for that right now, I'd have to dip into savings / debt I don't want to use. Newegg doesn't have them, but on Amazon they're $110 for each 256GB Lexar 633x or $120 for each 256GB Sandisk Extreme, plus $13 for same-day shipping or $12 for 2-day shipping. (I don't have Amazon Prime.)

 

AFAIK Clevo laptops have never been able to boot off the SD card. I've tried this a few times and the best I could do was install to the SD card but put the bootloader on an internal SATA drive.

PXE is network boot. It's probably just jumping to that as it goes through the list.

Have you simply checked your boot list? Depending on how you've installed your OS you may just have to pick it out of the list for each drive. ie. for Windows you should see "Windows Boot Loader" or for Linux you should see a distro name (such as "ubuntu"). It's also possible to have multiples of them.

If you haven't installed in EFI mode, keep in mind some desktop boards can (and will) actually boot legacy installs without the "boot" flag set at all. But this won't happen on laptops in most cases. You NEED to have the boot flag set for CSM or a valid EFI bootloader partition to boot from.

 

They use PCI-Express links to the card reader to ensure high speeds.

You can disable network booting if it's something you don't want to use.

 

Ahh okay, @Stooj, I guess I thought it had something to do with a PCI Express SSD interface or something. And @Meaker I'm guessing it's not (yet) possible to boot off PCI Express? I think I've disabled network booting for now, although if I need it in the future I'll re-enable it.

I actually haven't gotten as far as installing the OS yet, although I have made some progress. At first, I was getting "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" when attempting to boot off anything. This wasn't just the external SD card (on which I'd used YUMI to put several Linux distros), it was also the internal hard drive. On the HDD, I had plugged it into my desktop and cloned the SD card onto it.

I went in and turned off UEFI, then was able to turn off the boot logo (idk why the option was greyed out before). I also changed the boot order to select the USB card reader first. THEN I was able to finally get into the syslinux boot options, then try booting various Linux distros. (Also using F7 to bring up the menu would boot off the card reader, whereas previously it would refuse to boot.) I'm thinking, if UEFI secure boot makes it so I can't boot 3rd-party OS's (besides Windows), I'm leaving it off. I have it disabled on my desktop PC, although I still have the UEFI "pretty" bios. My laptop doesn't have the eye candy, it's an older style looking bios.

So I was able to try several Linux distributions, and so far I think my best bet is Lubuntu 15.10 desktop AMD64. Test results of some other distros on the laptop are:
KXStudio 14.04.2 64bit, Zorin OS 9.1 Core 64, LXLE 14.04.3 64bit - no sound plays, resolution maxed at 1024x768
Lubuntu 14.04.3 desktop amd64 LTS (this would also have been one I would have wanted to use, as I prefer LTS), Linux Mint 17.3 cinnamon 64bit, Ubuntu Studio 14.04.3 LTS amd64 (I kinda wanted to use this one because of my main uses for the laptop) - black screen when trying to load GUI
PCLinuxOS64 KDE Fullmonty 2014.12 - "no default or ui config directive found"
PCLOS64 KDE MiniMe, LXDE, Mate - gets to install screen, but no live option, didn't proceed farther.
Porteus LXQt v3.1 x86_64 - kernel panic
PuppyLinux Slacko64 6.3.0 - had to use console trickery, but does start booting, but gui totally messed up.

Rejects, from having tried them in a VM on my windows PC previously include Linux Lite, Android x86 5.1, Chromixium 1.5, CorePure64, PuppyLinux Precise & Wary, Steam OS, TinyCorePure64, ReactOS, NanoLinux1.2.

So, now that I've for now decided on Lubuntu ... I go to try to install, and it squawks at me about a partition being in use. What? I hadn't booted off that hard drive, why is it locking its boot partition? So I ended up somehow deleting that partition - I think by plugging it into my desktop again, booting Linux off the SSD and deleting the partition. I then put it back in the laptop. (Somewhere in there I also deleted the other still-empty partitions - 144GiB ext4, 64GiB Swap and ~1.6TB NTFS.)
Actually, now I'm remembering that it's in gparted on the laptop that it complains about the partition on the HDD being in use, whether it's the clone of the boot partition from the SD card, or the swap, even when I turn swap off. And come to semi-remember again, I think it complained even with the boot partition deleted while swap was still on there.

Now, when clicking past the "Preparing to install Ubuntu -- for best results please ensure....." screen, I get "ubi-partman failed with exit code 10. Further information may be found in /var/log/syslog. Do you want to try running this setup again before continuing? If you do not, your installation may fail entirely or be broken.)

Any ideas what I should try next? I'm thinking, I have a 2GB SD card that currently has an older version of Ubuntu on it, although it won't boot fully, at least on the desktop. One thing I think I might try is wiping that SD card and "burning" my Lubuntu ISO to it using my desktop, but I'm not sure what program would be best to use. (I don't think I want to use YUMI for it though.) Then I'd try using that to install Lubuntu. Right now the internal HDD has 144GiB ext4, 64GiB swap and 1.62TiB NTFS partitions, but I'm thinking I should wipe them and start over. (I may need the desktop to do that though.) So far this time wiping them it didn't complain, so now I'm rebooting to see what happens next...

And, I still get the partman complaint. Guess it's time to make a new Lubuntu installer on that 2GB SD...

 

You can boot off of PCI-express now, historically yes that is why you could not boot from it. As for now it may be more of a bios limitation, you could always check with Prema.

 

SUCCESS!! (So far...)

Okay so I ended up removing the Lubuntu iso/installer from the 32GB SD card, then re-adding it with YUMI. (I tried using unetbootin to put it on an older 2GB Kingston SD, but it was taking a long time to get anywhere. Also I suspect the 2GB card may have had issues, cause it was showing a total capacity of "1,940,...." instead of "2,000,..." bytes.

So, now, I'm finally running off the hard drive with a fresh Lubuntu 15.10 install. I set up a 3MB boot loader partiton, a 144 GiB ext4 partition, and a 64GiB swap partition, with the remaining 1.6TB of the hard drive currently unassigned. (I was originally going to fill it with an NTFS partition so I could more easily interface with Windows, but.... see below.)

Now there are a few things I'd like to do right off the bat.

First, how do I temporarily disable the touchpad while I'm typing? I keep hitting it and moving my cursor.

Second, what would be a better task manager / process manager than the built-in one? I like the way KSysGuard and Gnome System Monitor look, would one of those work or is there a better similarly graphical one? Also what's a good program (similar to HWMonitor on Windows) for monitoring temps, etc?

Also, how do I enable exFAT support? I'll want to be able to copy files off my 128GB and 256GB SD cards as I fill them while taking videos next weekend. I originally intended to drag and drop from the SD card to the 1.6GB partition, but for now, at least gparted is saying it can't read the ext4 filesystem. I can still copy/move them, though, so I suppose a workaround I could do for now is, using Gparted, clone the partition from the SD card onto the unallocated space on the hard drive, then delete all or format in-camera to re-use the card.

Or should I go ahead and create a new topic with the new info + questions?

I'm still waiting on the replacement M.2 Intel 7265 WLAN card from Newegg, hopefully it'll be here Monday. (I selected 3-day shipping, and it shipped out from PA on Wednesday.)

 

Hi I just got a Clevo based laptop
Clevo Barebone - P750DM
Display - 15.6” IPS Full-HD 1920x1080 16:9 Matte (anti-glare)
CPU - Intel Skylake Desktop Grade i7-6700
GPU - NVIDIA Quadro M1000M 2GB GDDR5

Ubuntu 16.04 is just not booting - I get to the "Try Ubuntu without installing" and when I click on it, the whole screen goes blank. Am unable to 'check device' or 'test memory' Any ideas?

 

SOLVED: Then did some googling and 'nomodeset' to boot/install and then installing nvidia proprietory drivers solved the issue.
https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_sarah_cinnamon.php
Everything working like a charm now.