Tim's (still) not blogging

Installing Ubuntu on old laptops

I tried to install Ubuntu 18.10 and 19.10 on some old HP EliteBook 8560w laptops, and after installing and rebooting, I got “BootDevice not found” errors.

Not a ton of useful info, but this thread https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=242282

included:

sudo sfdisk -Y dos -A /dev/sda 1

which did the trick.


I had some other goofy issues with the BIOS on these laptops, but pulling the battery and holding down the power button for 15 seconds was enough to clear and get me back into the BIOS settings.

I don’t think I needed UEFI (not fully supported anyway), but I may have left it on and it worked too, after that sfdisk trick.