I’ve already done a Wednesday Update post, so for those of you just here for the news, scroll down and you’ll see it. However, I thought I’d post about the computer issues I have had lately in case anyone has suggestions.
In April 2017, my MacBook died. At that point I started using the Windows 10 laptop I inherited when my mom passed away. For over a year and a half it served me well, but about a month ago I ran into problems. It tried to do a Windows 10 Update, but the update failed, so it tried to roll back to the previous version, and couldn’t. So I’ve been stuck on the blue “Automatic Repair couldn’t repair your PC” screen, with options to shut down or try advanced options.
A little research revealed that I was supposed to have used Windows 10 to create a Windows Recovery DVD or USB drive in case I ever needed it. Well, since I inherited the computer I never knew to do that. There was what seemed to be good news though – there’s a Windows 10 Recovery image online that can be copied to DVD or a USB stick, and because Windows 10 was a free release you don’t need a product key.
I went to Walgreens and bought a 16 GB USB drive. I plugged it into the little 9-year-old blue netbook I use as a backup computer, and started downloading the Windows Recovery image to it… but download failed. Odd, because the recovery image was 4.7 GB and should easily fit on a 16 GB drive. However, on several attempts it failed at the 4 GB mark. I concluded, incorrectly, that I must have a defective USB drive.
I ordered a 64 GB USB drive from Amazon and tried once again, but it too had the download fail at the 4 GB mark. Now I thought maybe it wasn’t the USB drives that were the problem. I did some research and learned that the real culprit was that the USB drives were partitioned as FAT32, which cannot handle single files of sizes larger than 4 GB. My netbook gave me the option of re-partitioning the drives as EXT4, which would allow larger file sizes. However, when I tried to partition the 64 GB drive, I got “partition failed.” At that point I gave up and just accepted the fact that I’d be stuck using the 9-year-old netbook with the dimly-lit 10-inch screen for the time being, as the working but unusable 3-year-old laptop with well-lit 15-inch screen sat there in a chair.
Earlier this week I was having a discussion with a friend about what’s known as “The Dark Web,” and he told me, “You can access it from any computer. All you need is a USB drive.”
“Yeah, I know how that works,” I replied. “All you need is a portable version of the Linux operating system that’s entirely on a USB drive, and have the computer boot from the USB drive rather than an internal drive. There’s a version of portable Linux specifically designed for hackers.”
A few minutes later, an idea popped into my head. I could not care less about hacking or the Dark Web, but that’s hardly the only use for portable Linux. There’s quite a few flavors of it out there. I could put a portable Linux installation on my 64 GB USB drive, configure my mom’s laptop to boot from USB, and I’d be back in business on that computer. No, I wouldn’t have access to my Windows applications, but that wouldn’t matter much. All the programs I use regularly – WordPress, Gmail, Evernote, Dropbox – are in the cloud anyway, accessible through a web browser. Plus Linux is a fun operating system to play around with. I could install a web server on it and teach myself some new programming languages and frameworks.
I Googled and found a recent article on the 7 best portable Linux distros to run from USB. The distro the hackers use, BackTrack/Kali Linux were on there. However, it was not the one I chose, because I have no interest in “The Dark Web” and because it’s more command-line-based Linux. I want a pretty window-based graphical user interface.
The distro I decided upon was Porteus. It can work with a variety of window managers included the widely-used KDE, and it has a footprint of only 350 MB. That would be less than 1% of my 64 GB drive, leaving plenty of room for saved files and add-ons. I grabbed a copy from an FTP mirror, did an MD5 check to make sure it downloaded without error, used 7Zip to unpack the ISO, and copied the directories I needed to the root of the USB drive. I ran a program to make the USB drive bootable, and at that point I appeared to be good to go.
I took the USB drive out of my little netbook and inserted it into my mom’s computer. Still on the Automatic Repair blue screen, I clicked Shut Down. I did a little research and found that on an HP Pavilion 15, I needed to hit F10 upon startup to access the computer’s BIOS menu, where I could tell the computer to attempt to boot from USB drive first and the internal hard drive second.
I restarted the laptop and furiously hit F10… but the computer didn’t notice, and after a minute that blasted blue “Automatic Repair” screen came up and I was right back where I was before. This time I clicked the Advanced Options tab, and there was a “Restore from USB” option. That was as close as I was going to get to “boot from USB,” so I gave it a try. The computer shut down, restarted, and immediately told me “Cannot boot from this device.” However, it gave me an option to go to the computer’s BIOS menu, which is what I had intended to do all along.
I went to the Configuration menu and set USB as a higher priority boot device than the hard drive, and tried again, hoping Porteus Linux would appear on my screen along with the beautiful KDE windowing system a minute later.
It was not to be. The computer ignored the USB drive and went right back into “Attempting Automatic Repair…” and that led me to the blue screen again. Once again I found myself stuck in a loop where I can’t boot into Porteus and I can’t boot into Windows. What I need to do is tell the computer “Forget you ever had Windows installed on you, and look for any other boot device attached to you that has an operating system on it.” As of yet I can’t figure out how to do that, though. So here I type on my 9-year-old netbook.
If anyone reading this has ideas I haven’t thought to try. I’d love to hear them. Email me at paul@paulryburn.com. Thanks.