I have an older desktop (circa 2010) that I’m trying to repurpose into a small game server and NAS. It doesn’t have UEFI. I’ve tried booting from USB and from DVD. I can get into the BIOS boot menu and select the device to boot from, but after I select it just goes to a blank screen.
I’m using the onboard AMD GPU. This is a fresh hard drive. I’ve tried the boot media on my laptop and it boots fine. I’ve put the old Windows 7 SSD back into the desktop and it boots fine. I’ve tried different images: Fedora Silverblue, Antix x64, Antix 386. Everything is giving the same results.
Can you recommend any other troubleshooting tips?
It could be that you’re trying to boot images that only do uefi boot? Or is the machine old enough to not support 64-bit stuff? I resurrected my first Thinkpad (2003) with a Debian 32-bit install, that’ll surely boot on yours as well!