Can't find Legacy Boot in my BIOS

[Corky357]

Hi All,

Like all of you I have wasted a lot of time on this.  Fortunately I did find the solution; for me anyway.

I discovered a paper issued to suppliers from intel: Technical Advisory, WW28, July 2020, Document Number: 630266,"Removal of Legacy BIOS Boot Support for Intel Platforms"

This indicated to me why there are no Legacy options available on the HP Omen with an Intel© Core™ i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz. 

In this case I made the assumption that you must be able to boot from a USB stick.  I bought a brand new memory stick just to make sure that wasn't an issue, used Rufus in Win 10 to create a UEFI bootable stick with a Linux Mint 20 .iso image.  Ensure you choose GPT partition type scheme, the rest of the defaults work.

Note: Partition has to be GPT

In the BIOS I switched off secure boot and disabled fast boot. Shutdown, insert stick and booted. Choose compatibility mode from grub menu if you have Nvidia graphics card, Linux Mint 20 live running.  I installed mint 20 onto my SSD, I didn't bother with duel booting as I have for the last 15 years. Win 10 runs very well in VirtualBox if you need it.

[LisaH67]

I have a HP 17.3 i5 laptop and am trying to boot from a usb stick that was formatted with a secure desktop for working from home. How would I go about being able to use it? The normal procedure is to disable secure boot and enable the Legacy. This laptop had Windows 10S but I turned the 'S' off so I could use Google Chrome with it. 

I am not familiar with Rufus? And not sure why yours shows Linux?

Could you help me with this? It doesn't look like support is any help at all. 

[Corky357]

Hi, Sorry to hear you are having issues with your HP 17.

Just to clarify your 'Linux' comment first.  I don't use Windows as my operating system, I use Linux Mint and have done so for a very long time.  Windows is a necessary evil I need only to update my Bios as Linux support has been removed from HP machines.  I therefore needed a Linux bootable USB stick to replace windows 10 on the new HP Omen I purchased.  I then needed a bootable Windows USB stick to update my Bios.

The problem is that newer HP laptops do not support legacy mode, the option isn't in the Bios.  To get a USB stick to work it has to be formatted with the GPT EFI partition scheme (not legacy MBR).  Newer Windows 10 will not recognise or boot from MBR disks.

Rufus is software that runs on Windows 10, that will create a bootable USB drive/Stick from an ISO image of Linux or Windows, MBR or GPT (there is other software that does the same)

To answer your question, If your laptop is a secure boot/EFI and you have disabled secure boot, it should boot from a USB drive formatted as GPT EFI.  If not perhaps your company USB is MBR and it wont work.  Your company will have to supply you with a correctly formatted USB, or find an old laptop with an old Bios to use just for work.

Hope that helps

p.s I am assuming that you have enabled booting from USB and changed the boot order.