Installing OS to old Acers

[grapefruit]

Hi!

 

So I've managed to acquire a couple of old Acer Veritons from work last week and I'm having trouble installing any OS onto either. They both ran XP for the last few years but have both been the victim of gdisk.

 

First off, they both have:

Pentium Dual Cores,

1GB DDR2,

160 GB WD Hard Drives

and so on...

 

So I've tried creating a boot USB with Ubuntu using the method shown here to no avail. Occasionally the PC will refuse to boot past the Acer splash screen, killing the keyboard until the USB stick is removed. I've also tried inserting a blank memory stick and an external hard drive to the same effect. The only way it will want to install an OS is through a boot CD. I had a copy of Windows 7 32-bit lying around so attempted that. It installed fairly successful until the second-bout of system restarts when it was stuck on a continuous loop of boot-blue screen.

 

I would preferably have Ubuntu installed, but will be happy with any operating system to start with!

[NotSoFast]

Chromium might be worth a go, either Cloudready or one of Arnold the Bat's builds. Although, now I reread your post I see USB booting is the problem, so ignore me! Edited November 30, 2015 by NotSoFast

[3s-gtech]

Hmm. I have a batch of these, they haven't given me a spot of trouble in six years, their replacements have just arrived now. Had no issue with deploying XP then 7 x64 to them. Check that the RAM is good, make sure AHCI mode is enabled if available.

[redwood]

From somewhere in a dusty corner of my memory I seem to remember a BIOS setting which needs changing to allow other OS to be run.