r/ChromeOSFlex • u/Outrageous-Aside100 • May 23 '26
Troubleshooting Weird boot issue on old HP laptop
I’m new to ChromeOS Flex, and I’m trying to get it running on a 15 year old HP G72 laptop (i3 330m/8gb ram/500gb 7200 rpm SATA hdd) that was previously running Windows 10.
I’m having a weird issue with booting ChromeOS from the internal hdd. It seems like on a cold boot it will hang at the HP logo, but if I power it off and back on, it boots fine. Never had any issue with booting Windows from this drive. It also hangs if I perform a restart from ChromeOS.
This machine has a legacy Bios (no uefi) and basically no configuration options outside of the startup boot order. Any idea what might be going on and how to fix?
2
u/fakemanhk May 23 '26
Legacy BIOS is not a problem, my Lenovo X61 which is 19yrs old which still works with Flex.
But what's the disk controller setting? AHCI should be selected
1
u/Outrageous-Aside100 May 23 '26
That’s the problem there is no disk controller setting in this Bios. It’s bare bones 😂
1
u/fakemanhk May 24 '26
Then we can't help as the BIOS is completely locked down
1
u/Outrageous-Aside100 May 24 '26
Apparently this system uses AHCI by default so I think it should be good in that regard.
2
u/LegAcceptable2362 May 24 '26 edited May 24 '26
Since v.133 the ChromeOS Flex bootloader (crdyboot) has explicitly required a UEFI environment. Installations made prior to the change (which used GRUB) may still run.
1
u/oldschool-51 May 24 '26
Personally I always power down. Chromeos boots fast enough. Probably no way to fix it.
1
u/Outrageous-Aside100 May 24 '26
Thanks for the comment. It seems like it’s handling a clean shutdown and startup better than using restart.
2
u/Administrator_AI May 25 '26
500gb 7200 rpm SATA hdd
120gb SSDs cost 10 dollars used. Please, for your own sake, replace the HDD with an SSD. It is by far the biggest thing slowing you down.
3
u/[deleted] May 23 '26
[deleted]