HP Omnibook 5 ARM laptop won't boot from USB

Support and Help
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1

Ubuntu Support Template

Ubuntu Version:
ubuntu-25.10-desktop-arm64

Desktop Environment (if applicable):
n/a

Problem Description

The intention was to create a dual boot laptop with Win11 and Ubuntu on the HP Omnibook 5, which was originally bought for my wife’s photo editing work, but rejected on the grounds that the screen was too small. I bought her a Macbook instead, which she quite likes and decided to see how Linux is going these days, after I last used Unix(Solaris) on a Sun Sparcstation backin the 90s and subsequently mostly using Windows. Basically I’m not keen on the way MS Windows is going.

After a false start with the wrong iso, I downloaded ubuntu-25.10-desktop-arm64.iso, checked that the checksum matched (it did). I used unetbootin on a win 10 PC to create a bootable USB (32Gbyte Sandisk formatted as FAT32). Having backed everything up on the laptop, I changed the BIOS parameters to recognise the USB stick on bootup, removed the disk encryption, created a new partition for the hoped for Ubuntu install and finally got a boot menu to display, to select Ubuntu or revert to the hard disk boot. The boot loader Grub v2.14 is clearly running, but selecting the linux boot from USB causes the screen to go blank for about 30secs before returning to the USB menu. Selecting the “next volume” option will boot OK into Win11.

Relevant System Information:
It’s a bog standard Windows 11 installation on HP Omnibook 5 laptop 14-he0xxx

Screenshots or Error Messages:
My first observation - no error messages whatsoever, so the first thing is to figure out what’s going on. Googling around, there is some slightly ominous stuff in the Linux community which suggests that ARM64 systems are still work in progress - a bit worrying, that. This is in stark contrast to seductive Youtube videos suggesting that the entire Win10 and 11 community is going over en masse to Linux to escape Orwellian oppression by Bill Gates. To investigate further, I dowloaded a Linux Mint iso and created another bootable USB, which worked perfectly well on my WIn10 desktop PC, both in legacy and UEFI modes.

What I’ve Tried
What we needed was an error message of some kind. A quick dive into the USB disk revealed the GRUB.cfg file which is the GRUB2 shell script for booting. The first problem is that GRUB is universal to all machine architectures and operating systems, so what you see in the manual is not what you necessarily get. The actual folder (directory) names on the USB stick in my case were generated under windows, whereas those described in the GRUB documentation follow the Unix convention with /etc and /dev and stuff like that that I remember from days of yore. With a bit of guesswork they can be equated to the MSDOS style folder names.

The GRUB script itself is located in \boot\grub\grub.cfg and the key lines that “do the business” are

linux	/casper/vmlinuz $cmdline  --- quiet splash console=tty0
initrd	/casper/initrd

the linux command loads the kernel from the file vmlinuz in the casper directory and then (I think) the initrd command initialises a RAM disk for the system to run in the USB partition. WHich presumably means this has to have enough space.

the "quiet" and "splash" directives apparently supress verbose output while booting and specify a splash screen should be shown. Removing quiet (they said) should enable verbose output. It didn't
A splash screen does not appear 
It's not clear whether the console=tty0 refers to a logical console before, or after booting, but omitting it doesn't make any difference

Still trying to get some clues, I tried invoking the debug environment variable using
set debug=all
this results in a zillion lines of debug output which scroll up the screen for several minutes, documenting every sector of the USB accessed. THe documentation is extremely hazy about what the debug options actually are, but I found a post that suggested
set debug=linux
you can also use
set pager=1 to control the screen scroll one page at a time 

I experimented with this somewhat, with the help of judiciously placed
echo "to show where we are in the script"
and 
sleep -v 10
which will put a 10 secound delay, with countdown in between commands

All this resulted in was a grub.cfg which reports
kernel file size :20988206
kernel numpages: 5125
kernal @ 0xc2871000
initrd
Using loadfile2 initrd loading protocol
linux command line: 'BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz clk_ignore_unused arm64...
(I had to type this from a photo of the screen, which then goes blank and after about 30 secs returns to boot menu)

If anyone manged to get this type of laptop to work, or has some suggestions as to how I might obtain better diagnostics, it will be greatly appreciated.

1 Like
2

Excuse me, but you are not going to get much help.

It would be useful if you supplied the hardware specification of that machine. Are you able to access the machine’s UEFI settings utility? Does it give you options to change the boot order or priority?

What tutorial or guide are you following? Are you intending to dual boot Ubuntu with some other operating system?

Answers to those questions will help others to help you.

Regards

3

my apologies, I am trying to get the hang of how this webasite works

sorry about the formatting above, I need to practice

4

We now have some useful information. This is what I think is happening.

You are using the UEFI utility to direct the motherboard to boot from the Ubuntu ISO image on the USB memory stick. The motherboard cannot find the Ubuntu boot files (Grub). So, it times out and boots from the bootloader on the internal drive.

How you resolve this I do not know. I am sorry. Re-write the Ubuntu ISO image to the memory stick?

Regards

5

thanks graymech, but GRUB is definitely loading from the USB stick and accessing the grub\casper folder to get the kernel image file. I renamed the casper directory temporarily and GRUB then fails with”file /casper/vmlinuz not found”. So at least I know that it’s possible to get sensible error messages. I just found some helpful info. on Ask Ubuntu “How do I add a kernel boot parameter” and also a descriptions of other parameters to do with device drivers e.g. how to get it to write a log to the USB stick. First, I hope to modify the linux command line to give useful diagnostics, then figure out what to do about it. Seems to me that it may be a device driver problem, but I don’t know whether we are using a .dtb and .dts file approach, or some variant of the ACPI methodology that Windows uses. There is no casper\dtbs directory on the USB so I think the device drivers must be cooked into the kernel somehow. The Ubuntu website naturally assumes that you are already running a linux system and describes various utilities invoked by sudo, on Windows I have to edit the grub.cfg file manually. Not very helpful to us would be refugees from Win11 tyranny. Watch this space!

6

Are you sure that Unetbootin is the utility for arm64.iso?

A quick search revealed that Rufus or Ventoy may be more suitable.

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7

thanks tea-for-one. I tried Rufus before using Unetbootin, because I read somewhere that Rufus may not function correctly in some cases. As far as I understand it, the .iso file just contains a directory structure of files that is unpacked into a (bootable) partition and is agnostic as to the actual contents of the stuff contained in the iso. The partiton is bootable because it is structured according to the UEFI definition. The \efi folder contains the actual boot loader grubaa64.efi executable, which accesses the grub.cfg file which controls its behaviour. If you use a linux system e.g. ubuntu to generate the USB from the .iso, you will get a different directory structure which uses linux style nomenclature. Linux provides various utitlities for manipulating the grub.cfg script, instead of simply editing it in notepad(WIndows), which imo adds unnecessary complication to an already opaque process. I might try firing up Linux mint on one of my other PCs and using that to generate the USB from the .iso… who knows?

Anyway, I made some progress with by appending directives debug debug=
after the — on the linux command line

I was then rewarded with a red error message “HWID matching failed. no DT blob will be selected. not found”

Further investigation reveals that this may be due to a missing .dtb file, which could be added to the USB and configured in the grub.cfg somehow. I assume that each model of laptop would have its own .dtb file (or .dts file), but so far I have not found one for HP omibooks.

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8

Hi there, there is a discussion thread open for this model on my repo. @jeremiah-cornelius has gotten pretty far already with booting and installing on his Omnibook 5. Maybe worth reading and joining. We will create a dedicated device tree soon-ish, for now its the boot option HP Omnibook X 14-fe1. -fe1 stands for the models with X1P42100 SoC, which is the same as the X1-26-100 in the Omnibook 5, just different binning.

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9

thanks glathe, I’m going to the jeremiah-cornelius link now, to take a look!

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10 
I had a good browse through the material under the link that glathe suggested – very helpful, if hugely above my current linux novice pay grade. There’s obviously a great deal of hard work going into this problem. 
Reearches on on ubuntu discourse and others led to this

github link to jglathe

which informed me that JeremiahCornelius said that he got “reliable USB boot with the image questing-desktop-arm64+x1e-20260119_extended_jg.iso from Jens' g-drive share, selecting the DTP for "HP Omnibook X" from the pre-built GRUB selections”, using an iso here in this link 
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1sc_CpqOMTJNljfvRyLG-xdwB0yduje_O
(I cannot get the actual link to insert and highlight in blue when I press ctrl-k or click the double chain link icon)

I chose resolute-desktop-arm64+x1e-20260214_extended_jg.iso on the grounds that it was the newest attempt on the list and maybe even better…??
This looked promising because HP omnibook, albeit a different model from mine, is specifically mentioned. So I used rufus on my Win 10 PC to create an install for this distro iso file. On boot-up it drops into a grub menu that lists various laptops and then allows you to try booting the selected one. The grub menu setup is instructive, I can see that a devicetree command specifies a file /x1p42100-hp-omnibook-x14.dtb located in the root directory of the USB stick. Debug is turned on in the linux command string

And yes * * * SUCCESS * * * apart from error messages relating to efi(scrolled past before I could read it) and “Failed to start PD mapper service”, whatever that might be, nicely highlighted in red, it sucessfully boots through to the Ubuntu welcome screen!

I decided to continue from the USB stick, rather than install to the hard disk. You need a mouse to get through the setup menu, so I used a wired mouse in a USB-C port. defaulted most things, went into settings to find what works
Networking does not report presence of a Wifi adaptor. This laptop doesn’t have an RJ45 or other wired ethernet connection – I could perhaps try an RJ45 to USB-C adaptor for this, if I had one, but I don’t know in advance whether the USB device driver support will work in that case. 
but bluetooth mouse works as well!
- battery level indicator doesn’t work (error unknown)
- speakers and microphone don’t apparently work
I tested a couple of applications – Libre Office seems to work OK.
Further work is obviously needed on the non-functioning devices – as a work-around one could presumably use the normal device driver install procedure in Ubuntu (with which I am not as yet familiar) to add them after booting. 


Ftb, I am pleased that it proved at least in principle possible to do useful things in Linux with this HP Omnibook 5 14-he0xxx laptop.
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11

It’s always a nice gesture to mark the relevant post as a solution:-

  • It allows Ubuntu users/searchers to easily find a workable solution to same/similar problems
  • The user posting the answer receives recognition for their effort
  • The thread is closed to prevent meandering off-topic in the future
  • Users/helpers know that they can ignore topics with a solution and concentrate on assisting elsewhere

It seems that post no. 8 from @glathe is the pertinent reply

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12

You could try the newer resolute-desktop-arm64+x1e-20260214_extended_jg_1.iso from the same place, its 26.04 and it actually allows and usually succeeds in installing on SSD (don’t throw the Windows install away, though - needed for firmware). I’m writing up a wiki entry for these kind of images, it’s still WIP. It works well on X1, though.

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13

Thanks to both glathe, tea-for-one and other collaborators, I will close out this thread here, as I now have a usable linux laptop and can await futher development of the distro. The Ubuntu front end at first glance certainly seems clean and intuitive and I am pleased to see Libre Office, Firefox and Thunderbird installed at the outset.

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