On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 9:58 PM gregrwm <tclug1 at whitleymott.net> wrote: > > in any situation where booting the hard disk is amis i reach for a thumb drive and boot that. usually the latest ubuntu iso will boot most anything that isn't bleeding edge iron, tho yes there are situations where you need to get an extra driver, and if so it can be put on the same thumb drive. hopefully that will do it, else you get busy with googling. from the iso you can simply use grub-install (ubuntu) or grub2-mkconfig (centos) to install a bootstrap, or do a sparkling fresh complete install, without wiping out whatever you might want to keep if you know what you're doing, and once it's bootable you can setup dual- or multi-booting, even all within the same partition, per our prior exchange. while indeed most of this deviates from the "normal" install instructions, you can find the howto's, or keep asking if uncertain. > Greetings Thanks for the ideas. What worked was to play with the bios setting. HP has a quite different way that it uses the bios compared to the other systems (dell and generic) that I've used in the past. What needed doing was drilling down to the exact partition that had the efi/boot information and then the system recognized that the hdd was valid and could be booted from. What I found in my previous multi-boot attempts was that it just wasn't possible to multi-boot using 2 different versions of Debian - - - it may work with other *nixes but not here. There was no way to get the efi/boot area to keep separate the two (debian stable and debian testing). There may be a way but I couldn't find any options nor any precedents so I now have two different systems both on wakeonlan and set up to run headless AND without any other peripherals. Regards Dee