I Need Help With Linux

[SamuelT.]

Ok so I bought some old computers from the school district I live in at their auction they have at the end of every year. (Two computers for Ten dollars) One computer is operational with two gigs of ddr2 ram (4 sticks of 512 mb) all of this isn’t surprising but what I didn’t expect was, they told me they wouldn’t have operating systems, I was fine with this because I was going to put Linux on it. But once I booted it up and found it had an operating system I was unexpectedly not overjoyed to find an operating system. My school systems has countless security measures ensuring the students can’t do anything evil to them. So I told myself ill just install Linux in the same hard drive as the windows seven it will over write it and completely remove it but then I was stumped because every solution I could find for booting from a usb drive has proven incorrect. 

      I tried.

·         Reordering the boot order (still booted up the password encrypted junked up windows)

·         Going to the boot menu and directly booting from the usb (same as before)

·         turning off the hard drive through the bios then booting (Big string of error codes but no Linux booting)

·         Then to top it all off I tried all of this again with the usb drive in EVERY port.

Please help I’m in dire need of assistance.

 

Can I wipe my hard drive somehow?

Can I boot it in another manner?

 

Btw I’m thirteen and the only other computers I have had has been my laptop and although this is my first tower desktop I know what I’m doing. But I did go through this same thing putting a technical preview of windows ten on my laptop which is why i don’t understand why it’s not similar to that. (Different bios, different age, so I understand there is going to be a difference)

[Taswell]

your school is probably using bit locker or something similar to protect the drive. Bit locker is meant to protect data, it should have no problem erasing it. 

 

does the motherboard support USB booting? do you have the model of the motherboard? The Motherboard might not have  USB booting enabled (most likely)

 

have you tried booting your flash drive with the hard drive completely removed to see if your flash drive is even boot-able.

 

You could try a different boot method on the flash drive. Ex use YUMI for Legacy booting and RUFUS for EFI Booting.  

 

Try cmos resting the bios or revert to default bios settings.

[capdauntless]

If you have access to another PC you could plug that drive in to it and format it within that PC's Windows OS.

 

If you have access to a Windows Disc you can boot to that CD/DVD and use the formatting software built in to the installer to erase that drive.

 

You can also burn an ISO with DBAN and boot to that. It's completely free and works wonders. They have a good forum too if you have any questions on how to use DBAN.

[capdauntless]

I was just wondering how you made out with this. What did you end up doing?