Help!!

I just picked up a couple of inexpensive HP Z400 workstations (Xeon W3550, 18GB ECC DDR3, 500GB M.2 connected to SATA), with HP BIOS 3.20 and I'm running into a kernel panic when booting the 16GB Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon installer USB3 thumb drive:

RIP: 0010:acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler) ... Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init! exitcode=0x00000009


I know the machine was operating well with Windows 10.

I also downloaded HP BIOS 3.61 and extracted it to another 16GB USB3 thumb drive, but I can’t seem to get the existing 3.20 BIOS to recognize it.

I read some things that maybe the BIOS can’t deal with thumb drives over 8GB, so I tried partitioning the thumb MBR with a 16MB ExFAT partition and copied the DOS folder contents into it, but still giving errors trying to flash the updated 3.61 BIOS using the existing 3.20 BIOS

Another problem is that 16GB is the smallest thumb drive I now have and while I have DVD/CD/BD drives, I don’t have any blank CD-R media to write to… 🙂

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HP has Linux for the Z400, so we know it can work. Have a look at this: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...os-4175712801/

I got the BIOS flash to work and after updating the HP Z400 BIOS from 3.20 to 3.61 , the Linux Mint 21 installer booted and ran fine!


For the BIOS flash, I created an MBR partition table on a 16GB USB3 thumb and a single 64MB FAT32 partition, copied the files over and the HP Z400 finally saw the contents and let me flash the BIOS to 3.61

Linux Mint 21 installed and up and running now!
Thanks!