[GTALUG] Questions for sys install

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: o1bigtenor <o1bigtenor at gmail.com>

| BestBuy had some systems on sale for after Christmas so ordered an Asus desktop.
| 
| AMD mobo 6 GB of ram, built in wifi w DVD RW all for can $360 inc shipping.

When asking for help, concrete information reduces uncertainty of your
reader.  So: what exactly did you buy?

| Now comes the kicker. Wanted to set the uefi bios to boot from Cd-rom
| so that I could use gparted to give myself some disc room to enable a
| dual boot system (Debian testing being the flavor du jour). It will
| NOT boot onto the cd-rom it says that an illegal modification has been
| made to the bios and the next boot option must be chosen.

Perhaps you left Secure Boot enabled?  I don't think that debian is
set up to satisfy the Secure Boot requirements.  You can turn it of in
the firmware configuation (what we used to call the BIOS setup screen).

I'm assuming that this is a UEFI boot disk.  If not, there is more
mucking about you have to do to enable MBR booting (and CSM loading).

| (There was zero material with this system. It boots and all but there
| is nothing with it. Even the OS key is burned into the bios. There
| isn't even a system sticker any more!!)

I'm not 100% sure where Windows license cookie crumbs live any longer.
Once you update the Win 10, I think they live in Microsoft's database
(they call it the Cloud to make it seem more new-age).

| Any suggestions on how to get this system to boot onto the cd-rom
| short of pulling the hard drive and replacing it?

A precise and accurate symptom report might or might not help us help you.