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okay so i bought this laptop forever ago was just a shell. bought a hardrive battery and so fourth. then ran into the issue of what OS to use. well long story short a buddy of mine from work whom i no longer work with installed to my knowledge and understand is ubuntu mate 14.04. i would like to wipe the enitre old system off and replace it with brand new ubuntu 16.04 or 17.01 but i really am not the smartest when it comes to this whole terminal deal. so if maybe someone can give me some insight on how to go about this. all i want is to wipe everything off old and start OS brand new newest version and absolutely nothing on it at all other then the new OS. please Help, ty in advance. i have a 80gb hardrive.

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  • i have also made a usb of 16.04 so i thought to run on boot and try to at least have it on thumb drive for temporary start point but that didnt work and that error code just for the thumb drive was gfxboot.c32 not a com32r image boot: and kept repeating the sam message every 10 seconds Nov 20, 2017 at 0:01
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  • You can directly upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04. No need to do it from scratch if the system is working fine and you've been installing all the updates for 14.04 meanwhile. I often recommend a fresh install when things go south but the online upgrade is a fully supported method of obtaining the newer release version.
    – user692175
    Nov 20, 2017 at 0:10
  • Welcome to AskUbuntu. "not a boot image" means your system can't boot it (whatever tool you used to write the .iso to the usb didn't make it bootable; this step needs to be done correctly or by a tool that can. When i download an iso I firstly validate the md5sum (in a second I can save myself hours of debugging by validating no single bit was wrong) then write to thumb drive. If I have issues booting the thumb drive I test it in another system where if you test yours, I'm sure you'll get the same error proving you need to re-write your iso to usb.
    – guiverc
    Nov 20, 2017 at 0:12

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No need to be a terminal Guru here: Just download the ISO for the Ubuntu version you want and make a "Live CD/USB" for it. Unfortunately, this is installing a fresh version so you will need to back up any files that you don't want to lose permanently.

You can find ISO files here for standard Ubuntu here:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/

I'd recommend Xenial (16.04) since it's a long-term release: it will have updates released for longer than other releases. Of course, ISO image files for and distribution of your choice will work too. I recommend the Ubuntu clone "elementary OS" for a user-friendly, linux GUI which is fairly lightweight and works great on my ancient laptop: https://elementary.io/

To create a Live USB, just insert one into your machine and use "Startup Disk Creator" to select the ISO you want to use.

Depending on your system, you may need to install the disk creator:

sudo apt-get install usb-creator-gtk

See here for more details on the Start up Disk:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/create-a-bootable-ubuntu-usb-flash-drive-the-easy-way/

Reboot your machine with the "Live" USB inserted and you're good to go. It should bot onto the disk and you can "Try" or "Install" the Linux distribution all through the GUI. No need for the terminal for the installation unless the packages you wish to install afterwards are not supported by the Software Centre App.

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