Quote Originally Posted by frogo View Post
Hello

I have recently bought a new HD for my old Acer Aspire 1350 (from around 2003?). My hope was to seamlessly install from a USB stick. Alas, it seems the machine won't boot from USB. As I'm considering my options and before launching in a series of maddening attempts, I'm wondering if I could get a few words of wisdom as to which might be the best way to proceed.

Options I'm considering are:

1- make a bootable USB from an older stick (I don't know if I'll find one old enough or that's large enough, or if that's worth the bother)

2- make a bootable CD (I'm not too sure how to go about that)

3- install ubuntu on my new HD using another computer (making the new HD external), then perhaps reinstall if it works once placed back into the ACER machine

4- update the BIOS on the ACER machine (scares me)

Are there other, better options? and which should I try first? I have to say I'm rapidly becoming clueless when engaging configuration of any sort.


Also, given all this, is there any particular version of Ubuntu I should be looking at (I'll go for 10.04 in the mainline edition blindly otherwise).

many thanks
Hi... finally!

replying from the ACER machine running Lubuntu 10.10. This is the first boot, so far so good...

Option 3 worked with Lubuntu

1. burn Lubuntu ISO

2. Remove HD from other machine (so I wouldn't have to worry about where Grub goes with more than one HD)

3. Plug me brand new old school ATA drive in an external case via USB (fortunately the machine for the install was new enough to be capable of booting from USB without intermediate steps)

4. Boot

5. Install Lubuntu (went smoothly, I had to have a live internet connection for the network config; I didn't bother trying to be smarter than I am with partitions and there's just one ext4 and one swap -- I guess I can still come back to this in time; GRUB was placed on master)

6. Reboot (failed somehow on the host machine, I think because of its Intel Integrate Graphics; a couple of libraries said to be not found too, I don't know if it matters and if it's peculiar to the distro install)

7. turn off, take away ATA HD from case, place it into ACER machine, boot and voilà!

Many thanks for all the input, this has been quite eventful and long winded as I didn't have much time to spare, just hope it will be stable enough now.