Can't install any operating systems

Products & Technology ODYSSEY Serials
#1

I have been having a bunch of problems installing Linux OSs to the Odyssey. The first issue I encountered was that installs would go completely fine, but upon restarting, it appeared no bootloader was written, as the windows bootloader still remained. So I loaded up Gparted and wiped the partition table on the MMC storage completely scrubbing the included windows install, and then fired up a Linux Mint live usb to try installing Mint to the MMC again. Now Mint won’t even fully install - partitioning seems to work but during writing system files it always stops saying the media is faulty.

I have booted GParted and tried running badblocks/e2fsck on the MMC but no issues are found. I have also tried installing another distro, Void Linux, but it too can’t successfully install. I have tried multiple USB/microSD cards for the installers and the self-validation test doesn’t find any corruption on the installer drives I am using.

I have also tried all of the relevant BIOS options, including turning on CSM with UEFI and with Legacy mode, no change.

The closest I got to possibly fixing this was that the ubuntu package “boot-repair” claimed SecureBoot was enabled and so it could not perform repairs - but the BIOS has no SecureBoot setting whatsoever (VERY odd! Virtually every x86 computer I’ve used has had this), and CSM did not affect this error.

Any idea why I can’t seem to successfully repartition & install a linux OS to the built in storage?

#2

Ok now I have also noticed that BIOS options are no longer saving, every setting resets to default after saving and rebooting every time. I don’t have a CMOS battery installed but the sales page and manual say its just for the real time clock - aren’t the BIOS options stored in flash memory?

#3

@LiamSP Default design is lost the battery will reset the BIOS setting.

#4

Thanks for the reply appreciate it - that’s odd though because the sales material specifically states the battery is for the RTC alone. And until now I did not need one for the BIOS settings to save - I have been using this with the bundled windows install for a while and had no issues until I just now set out to replace it with a linux distro.

Either way I am mainly interested in the status of SecureBoot on the Odyssey x86 - I can’t find any setting for it, but this chipset almost certainly has it present, and all of these issues seem to be sort of pointing to some kind of secureboot BS. At one point when trying to install to an M.2 SSD ubuntu boot-repair specifically said that SecureBoot was enabled for the NVMe drive

Is SecureBoot enabled on the Odyssey and if so where’s the BIOS option to disable it like most computers have?