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First time asking here. Apologies in advance if formatting is bad.

I recently found myself in possession of several HP Elitebook Revolve 810's.

They have been stripped of their (mSATA) drive cards. I am able to boot from a Micro-SD card that has been flashed via dd, but I have been unable to get Ubuntu to install to the SD card when booted from a flash drive.

I know that when Rasbian is flashed to an SD card it creates a read-write filesystem. When I first began creating bootable flash drives for other operating systems, the first thing I noticed is that that does not happen as a general rule. I am assuming that this is due to the fact that most of the images used are .iso disk images. My current plan is as follows:

1. Create a partition on my working laptop of a slightly smaller size than 
   my Micro-SD.  
2. Install Ubuntu to this partition. 
3. Manually partition Micro-SD card with an EFI partition and a Partition
   sized the same as the Ubuntu install on my working laptop.
4. dd the installed Ubuntu over to the SD card.
5. dd the EFI partition on my laptop to the Micro-SD card.

Is there anything that I need to look out for while I am performing this operation? I did basic googling, but most of what I got was "How to flash an SD card with Rasbian! New 2019, Easiest way!", which is not exactly helpful.

Most of my knowledge comes from various tinkering over the past year, and any advice would be appreciated.

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    @Moab Thanks for the typo catch. Bit retarded today.
    – evan.g.hoose
    Sep 26, 2019 at 19:45
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    I just added an mSATA card to my laptop and was able to install Ubuntu and Windows both onto that mSATA drive; runs fast. Here's Amazon's list of mSATA drive cards: amazon.com/Internal-Solid-State-Drives-mSATA/s
    – K7AAY
    Sep 26, 2019 at 20:45
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    @e-g-h everyone has a fat finger day.....
    – Moab
    Sep 26, 2019 at 21:36
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    @K7AAY Thanks for the link, I was hoping to avoid having to purchase anything else, looks like I may not have that luxury.
    – evan.g.hoose
    Sep 30, 2019 at 18:33

1 Answer 1

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After more research, lots of headbanging, and other assorted frustrations, I found out that the BIOS on the Elitebooks would not allow me to boot from an EFI file on anything other than a storage device in one of the mSATA bays.

If someone has a similar issue, you may be able to update the bios, but my attempts to do so without windows were unsuccessful.

I appear to have lost the thread on HP peer support, but I attempted to extract the required files from the .exe provided by HP and boot into that from a removable flash drive. It would boot, but then respond "Install Failed" without so much as an error code.

Many thanks to those who took time to look at this, sorry I can't be more helpful.

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  • "...would not allow me to boot from an EFI file on anything other than a hard drive on one of the M.2 bays" ? Is that what you meant? Fixable by clicking edit.
    – K7AAY
    Sep 30, 2019 at 18:45

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