Hi! Someone I know told me about Linux (overall) is more lightweight than windows, so I decided to replace my my laptop with it. I saw Zorin, and tried to install it. It SAYS it installs, but then when I re-boot, BIOS doesn’t say it exists. Just says no bootable device found. However if I were to reinstall it again, the installer notices the OS on the drive. I have secureboot off, switched it over to Legacy, and still nothing changed. Any Ideas?
Hi, Geruiem.
Can you tell us your laptop model and specifically which installation options you picked while installing the first and the second time?
Please also see: Installed Zorin and all I have is a Grub prompt!
It’s a very cheapo laptop, a Dell Inspiron 11 3168 2-in-1 with 2 GB of ram, 32 gb of eMMC storage and an Intel celeron n3060. I did basically all of the normal things in the installer.
Language: English
Keyboard: English US
Didn’t hook up to wifi
Installed 3rd party software
Erase Disk and Install Zorin OS 15.3(first), then Erase Zorin OS 15.3 and reinstall(second)
Then I stuck with NY for location
After all of this it goes through the installer just fine.
I recently tried installing a different OS, and it didn’t boot automatically, so I hit F12 for the Boot Device Options, and it said “Selected Boot Device Failed. Press a Key to Restart”
eMMC, that makes me nervous.
In BIOS, have you ensured that Secure Boot is disabled?
I realize you have installed twice, now. Third time's the charm? On the bright side, you could call it Good Training.
I would recommend running the installation again. Enable WiFi during installation and download Updates as it installs. Instead of erase disk and install, choose the "Something Else" method.
A partition Manager will open. Click on the line that has your Zorin Install on it to highlight it.
Then click on the (-) button on the lower left to Delete that Partition.
Now click on the line that was declared Free Space by the above action. Click on the (+) button to add the partition. It will open a pop up window asking to format it. You can set the size you want the partition to be, Logical, Beginning of space... Then Select from the drop down menu for it to be Ext4 Journaling File System.
Important: For the mount point, select just
/
Click on continue and run the installation as normal.
If this installs, yet you fail to see Bootable media, you may need to boot off the installation media and use a Boot Repair Utility.
Alright, I’ll take a look at it.
It happened to install, but the bios still doesn't detect it. I'm gonna do the Boot Repair and see if that helps. Any ones you recommend?
I really prefer the Install in Ubuntu method (2nd option):
I currently have it open, however when I click Recommended Repair, nothing happens? I would quit out of it and restart it but I’m not sure how.
Well, you can just restart the machine to get out of what you are working on, booting back into the LiveCD media (Or USB).
You may need to reinstall the grub-loader.
But first… Dell BIOS- have you checked if you are Legacy or UEFI?
This is becoming a much larger problem haha. The bios is legacy, I think originally UEFI. Legacy is the option that gives me the ability to turn off secure boot.
I believe eMMC machines can be forced to work with Linux but generally …
I have great disdane for all things cut-down = eMMC, Celeron, Sempron, and on and on! 
I might just end up buying a new laptop that runs well enough to properly use Windows… I WOULD just build one myself as I did my desktop, making it way cheaper, but for laptops its impossible. It seems like a big ordeal to go through with this, and I’ve been in the need of a new laptop anyway.
Have you checked out the Zorin computers link?
At least then you know you can have Zorin fully working from the get go!
Swarf kinda nailed it. Dell Inspiron, Celeron, eMMC… it adds up.
I have gotten eMMC to work with Linux before but it is pretty hit and miss.
This hardware is just geared toward MS and there is not a lot you can do without re-writing the firmware for the hardware.
You asked for help and you certainly should receive an honest effort for it. From our perspective, what if that notebook is the only one you have available to you and you do not have the option of just picking up a new one?
But if you are thinking that it is more work than it is worth, I promise no one here will complain.
The usual methods above should work, but did not. This means that there is quite a lot of patching involved.
There is one remaining option however. Not the best option…
LiveCD works because it runs from the ISO and the storage is done in the Media, not the eMMC storage. It boots as media. You could still use the machine by running the LiveCD as persistent, causing it to remember changes and boot up in the place where you last left off.
There are downsides: The USB port is a bottleneck and the changes must be written through that bottleneck. It would run pretty slow compared to a normally installed installation. You would want to use Zorin LITE not Core.
Your storage would be limited to the media; not a big deal if your media is big enough.
It’s more of a band-aid than a solution. But sometimes,a band-aid is all you need.
I did notice the computers section, but I am originally more of a MS guy (typing on Windows ATM 
). The main reason I wanted to do this was because of the laptop and knowing it was slow. More of a bring-back-to-life kind of project. But, at this point, given I need a new one anyway (I’m a senior in HS) and will need one for college, it makes the most sense to get a decent laptop and maybe run dual-boot. You guys were a lot of help, and I appreciate taking your time to help me out!
I PROMISE I would probably use Linux most of the time (definitely not a MS or Apple fanboy), however I’ve had some trouble with Wine in the past and the number of applications offered on Linux without Wine are, well… limited 
.
In the end, I did have (surprisingly) quite a bit of fun going through all of this, and intrigued me a lot. I just looked up Linux distros on Google and Zorin came up and… It’s just such a clean distro in comparison to the others. Someone in another forum suggested Lubuntu, and as soon as i loaded it up I disliked it. The way everything is so fluid and minimalist, it really looks good! Keep up the work devs, whoever you are
One of the suppliers actually offers Windows 10 so you could ask for dual-boot but not sure if your location is covered. Clevo.