# Is there a way...Linux Mint question



## Arjai (Jun 14, 2017)

So, I have this old emachines box that I have upgraded to a P4 at 2.8Ghz.

I have Mint12, Lisa running problem free but, BOINC manager is also old and won't get jobs anymore.

My solution is to upgrade the distro. So, made a bootable disk of Sarah, mint 18. However, I cannot get it to boot from the USB or the CD drive. I have played with this effed up BIOS for what seems like forever.

Question is this: is there a command in Terminal that will download the boot file for the new distro? It seems like there should be a way. Although, I am unsure if my CD drive is being recognized.

So, Question 2: is there a way to see if the drive is accessible?


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## craigo (Jun 14, 2017)

Dependant on the manufacturer of your particular emachine the boot menu key is esc, F9 or F12 these keys will allow you to select the boot device, Only the options listed are recognized as bootable.
If the device you intend to boot from is not listed you may be able to modify the priorities in bios to make it bootable.
legacy machines of that era may not support USB bootable but a bios update may introduce USB boot functions.


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## blobster21 (Jun 14, 2017)

You might want to test the bootable media you created on another (more recent) computer, to see if it's really bootable as exepcted.

It may turn out that something went wrong during the creation (corrupted iso ? media doesn't have the active flag ? )


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## Norton (Jun 14, 2017)

Another option may be to have someone load up a hard drive with the distro you want and send it to you.

I've done this with Ubuntu a few times but am not sure if Mint would be as easy to do.


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## Arjai (Jun 14, 2017)

After sleeping on it, I remembered that over a year ago, when I was loading, probably 3 years ago, a distro, that I had to use a different cd player. So, I just Frankenstein-ed a different drive and the image is loading. Go figure.

LOL, old machine quirks, I should write these things down! 



No Bios updates available, Boot key is DEL and the Frankenstein-ed Drive did the trick. Now, to install BOINC and make it all worth it!


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## theFOoL (Jun 30, 2017)

To my Experience  Linux Refreshes on Boot to any Computer so by Installing the OS via Another PC and transfer the HDD to that PC should Boot Fine


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## FordGT90Concept (Jun 30, 2017)

BOINC really hasn't changed at all since version 5.  What probably happened is that the security certificate is expired.  If memory serves, I run version 7 on my server for all the files except the executable.

That said, you should be able to pull the latest version of BOINC off the MINT repository.


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