Factory reinstall

[Bighorn]

I learned something today about doing a factory reinstall with an HP All-in-One. The remote diagnosis/install by the company failed but the computer works fine booted to a Linux Mint USB drive. A link was given the customer to access a video with the how-to, pretty standard stuff. The surprise to me was the requirement not to use a SanDisk Thumb drive to create the bootable install drive from a link yet to be received by E-Mail for the download function. The mention of a thumb drive failing and to use a different one is in this video:

The video is obviously by HP but may be of informational value for other brands. I could have simply used my USB drive created by the MCT/Media Creation Tool but the computer is about a month old and any warranty would have been canceled if using non-HP software.

 

[BigFeet]

That's odd. Most of my usb drives are sandisk too.

 

[Bighorn]

Because they usually are on good-price sale at our local ShopKo I've been getting Verbatim drives, haven't had a problem for 4GB up through 64GB and they are usually formatted as FAT32 except the 64GB is exFAT.

 

[Saltgrass]

With newer Dell systems, you can do a factory reset using a Win 10 recovery drive. I use this process when I replace a OEM drive with new drive.

 

[Tim Locke]

Some Sandisk thumb drives had a non-removable area on them. I remember that some things that required and empty drive would not work with them

All mine are Kingston.

 

[Bighorn]

Some Sandisk thumb drives had a non-removable area on them. I remember that some things that required and empty drive would not work with them

All mine are Kingston.

I only ran into that problem once. My biggest problem with SanDisk is they do not stay 'locked'/extended when inserting into a port, most I use now are Verbatim, PNY [sliding cover] and the "switchblade" style of other brands.

 

[T_J]

I recently did full install of Ubuntu 18.04.1LTS on two new SanDisk USB flash drives: one was 8 GB Cruzer Blade USB 2.0 and the other was 64 GB Ultra Flair USB 3.0. Boot-loader installed to the USB flash drive. The 64 GB USB 3.0 is fast enough (my Dell only has USB 2.0 & 3.0 ports) and has plenty of room for future 'software updates', etc. These bootable SanDisk USB flash drives work great with a 2012 Dell Windows 10 PC (mine); and a 2011 Windows 7 PC (not mine).

Actually ordered another 64 GB Ultra Flair USB 3.0 for myself (full install Ubuntu). Will keep my Dell desktop; Windows 10 only. Gave up on Persistent USB (Ubuntu), due to 'software update' / boot problem.

 

[Bighorn]

I have an extra 64GB Thumb drive I'll be installing Linux Mint on later today mostly because it came formatted as exFAT and I want to see how that works out. It's interesting as Windows can't format more than 32GB as FAT32 and the MCT process automatically reformats. I mistakenly used a 64GB last year and it did reformat as 32GB but could not access the remainder of the drive, ended up using GPARTED in Linux to delete/repartition.

 

[T_J]

I followed these instruction http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2014/11/install-real-ubuntu-os-usb-drive/

I made a 10 GB FAT32 partition for files; and a 52 GB Ext2 partition for the OS (may later re-install and choose Ext4 & disable Journaling). I omitted the Swap partition (Ubuntu 18.04 has a Swap file). Wonder if changing swappiness to 10, will work on a swap file?

I only did this because I used Ubuntu from 2010 to 2016 (& Windows); and trying to help someone (for 2020+) who did not upgrade Windows 7 to 10. So my 2 posts aren't off topic to much: no Windows 10 upgrade; and SanDisk USB flash drives.

 

[Bighorn]

I just tried the USB Image Writer with the 32-bit version of Linux Mint 19.1 with my 64GB thumb drive and it doesn't work the same as with 16GB drive, only installed LM at 2 GB and left 1GB free, the file format was ISO9660 and Windows can't read it. The drive did boot when used in an older Acer Aspire Notebook running Vista. So much for that trial, used GPARTED to delete and restore the drive but chose FAT32 then used it in Windows to reformat to exFAT. The formatting/reformatting does use about 10% for itself, leaves 58GB for use.