Hello to everyone,
after years, I am here again. ;-)

On my Acer Aspire E-14 laptop broke the SSD and I got a new one. Due to this quarantine I cannot move much around here and the big centres with Linux-savvy people in the downtown city are closed now, also.

So, I got only a Windows 7 on my new SSD which doesn't recognise the two USB ports. Booting with a USB stick doesn't work neither.

But when I run a broken Debian install process that I started with the Debian w32 installer, then the mouse works with USB. Someone does understand this?

I tried Wubi.exe, what fails already in Windows 7. It isn't supported anymore neither.

This Acer Aspire E-14 doesn't have a CD or DVD drive, only the presumably not working USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI and an SD card slot, which doesn't boot neither.

I had the impression that in ancient times there was the possibility to simply install from the network without any external bootable device. Someone knows of that?

On this laptop, I got now from the things I tried, a bootmanager that has 1) Windows 7, 2) the broken Debian install that complains about not having a CD, and 3) a UNetBootin entry that also doesn't work.

When my laptop broke, I tried my old PC that I haven't switch on for years. That was broken, too, because of a motherboard failure due to cockroaches. With this repaired, I see that this ancient Acer Aspire T-180 does have many USB ports but the BIOS doesn't support booting from USB ...

The installations on it, Lubutu 10.04 and Puppy 5.1, are that ancient that an upgrade is impossible. Only a new install from scratch. Fortunately that PC has a DVD writer on it.

With this PC, I tried a PXE network install for the laptop, but the Lubuntu 10.04 cannot install dnsmasq ... because version 10.04 too ancient ...

Seems that I need first to install a new OS on that PC to run then subsequently a PXE server to then run a network boot on the laptop. In connection with that, I have read that I would need first to make the iso file bootable? Is that true? How would I do that?

Any other ideas, please?

No, why? You'll boot not off ISO, but from TFTP images provided by Debian. See Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting in Debian Installation Guide.

1 members found this post helpful.

I had a heck of a time getting the usb ports working on a core i3 system in Windows 7. Had to apply a set of patches to iso images. If your Acer is in fact an i3 then it ought to be the newer xhci ports and Windows 7 needs a lot of work to get them up.

I'd attach the "known to boot" usb flash drive and go straight to bios. Does it show as a usb under the HARD drive menu? It is a hard drive order not a usb order.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you, may this help other users with the real problem.

Well, the first thing I noticed was that the old Acer Aspire T180 can actually boot from USB. There is no entry called "USB" in the menu, but the USB stick shows up under HDD if I had a closer look.


Setting then the boot menu to boot from that USB stick showed that the USB stick I have burned yesterday was crap for some reason. After fixing that, I could install then the newest Debian release on that old Acer PC.


Now, trying the same USB stick on the laptop shows that also this laptop boots from USB. This problem with the USB ports is only a Windows 7 issue and not being able to boot was only burning a crappy USB media and having no way to test it because I was blind, too ...


But thanks to you two guys in every case. As I mentioned above, may give it a hint other users with the real problem. At the Windows 7 issue I'll look later. I normally don't use Windows and wiped it out completely when I installed Debian on the newly bought laptop, but now I may leave just in case.