hp notebook doesn't allow boot from USB

Poita

I want to wipe my 10 year old hp Pavillion dm1 notebook’s drive and install Batocera so it’s a dedicated Batocera machine but apparently the hp bios does not allow you to set booting from USB as a primary boot.
It’s the same with my 5 year old hp laptop too. I have Batocera flashed onto a 31GB thumb drive but the annoying bios lock out won’t let me run Batocera from the thumb drive and also wont let me install Batocera onto my laptop via the thumb drive.
Is there another way to install Batocera onto the notebooks hard drive?

Atari

You could load a chain bootloader like GRUB onto the main drive and pass it off to Batocera. Check the dual booting page.

Poita

Boom. Problem solved :)
I posted the same question on the Wagner’s Tech Talk YouTube channel and got some guidance on removing the notebooks hard drive and flashing Batocera onto it.
It worked like a dream. I found in my old tech box that I had both a usb DVD read/write drive and also a usb 2.5″ hard drive enclosure box. I took the 320GB drive from my hp Pavilion and plugged it via usb to my other laptop that had Balena Etcher and also the Batocera iso on it. I first formatted the 320GB drive and deleted the partitions and set the whole thing up as a new simple on NTFS. Then I flashed Batocera to that drive and it worked perfectly. Now I just removed the drive from the enclosure and installed it back into my old laptop and it booted up perfectly into the awesome Batocera OS. Soooo happy it went this smoothly. Thanks dude. Now I don’t need to buy a box to install Batocera on. I didn’t mind as I could have gotten a good one here in the UK for £100 but when it occurred to me that I have unused older laptops it annoyed me to re buy what is essentially the same tech. Despite this hp Pavilion being ten years old and having an annoying no boot to bios set up, it’s actually quite spritly for its age and tiny notebook size. I remember playing Call of Duty on it about 8 years ago and it handled the game well. It has 8GB of ram which is unusual for a ten year old notebook I think. The drive is 320GB which is three times larger than my newer hp notebook that only has a 128GB HD. The processor is AMD E-350 (which is listed twice for some reason). And the onboard graphics chips as AMD Radeon HD 6310. As I only want to play Amiga and 80’s and early 90’s arcade 2D games the machine should be able to handle those easily I think. And actually I prefer having it as a dedicated Batocera OS machine instead of booting from a usb. Now I need to load some game roms, configure the HORI RAP4 arcade stick I just bought, feed the notebook picture to my Samsung 65″ smart TV and I’m away.

Theguybruh

Poita Hey read ASAP!! I am having the same issue, I have a new gaming pavilion hp laptop with a gtx 1650 and enough gb ram to run it, I flash it to a 512 gb onto my usb flash drive then I disabled secure boot, but while doing that I noticed that it doesn’t give me the option for legacy boot, so I putted to boot first to the usb flash drive when starting up the system (the only options it has are NFTS and doesn’t seem to have legacy boot), after I did that I loaded batocera from the usb flash drive and it loads for the first few seconds to the main batocera loading screen and then it shuts down my laptop automatically, is there something I did wrong? Any help would be appreciated. (Also is not the usb flash drive has I just brought a new one, and the system can’t be because it’s also new, but I believe it’s the legacy boot that’s causing the problem).

Atari

It’s awesome being able to repurpose old tech instead of throwing it out, nice work on getting the hardware aspect of it all sorted out.

Poita

Atari Yeah, Wagner’s tech talk gave me the simple instructions to do it.

Still can’t navigate the menu though using my HORI RAP4. I need a tutorial video on that

zerohart

Not sure if you are still having the issue, but my HP laptop had the same issue, all I did was I removed Secure Boot. then disabled Legacy Boot. rebooted the PC and was able to boot into batocera from the Thumbdrive and install it to the hard drive.