I have this budget (read: cheapo) laptop, a Schneider SCL141-CTP, with an Intel Atom X5 Z-8350 SoC, 2 measly gigs of RAM and a ridiculously small 32GB eMMC SSD, that's running Windows 10 Home, and will soon be left on the platform when the 19H1 big update shows up, because I'll never manage to clear enough free space to satisfy Microsoft's requirements.
I've been wanting to install Linux on this laptop because I'm fed up no end with Windows, which barely works on such modest hardware, but all my attempts have proven unfruitful.
After a lot of hemming and hawing, I managed to shrink the C drive by 2GB using diskpart, formatted the newly created partition as FAT32, and used UNetBootIn to put the latest Debian-based Slax 9 distro on it, hoping to boot from it and run it live for a while, just to make sure it would fit my needs, before installing it for good.
Nowhere in the UNetBootIN window did I find the option you can have in Rufus to choose between GPT and MBR.
Problem is, this PC has UEFI, and though the UNetBootIN partition does show in the boot menu, selecting it and pressing Enter gets me an error message saying that a boot file is damaged or can't be read, or something like that, and only offers me to boot from Windows.
The file in question is, without surprise, ubnldr.mbr.
I tried to add it manually to the UEFI boot menu by pointing the menu at the correct file path, but it can't be found; instead, I'm proposed another 32-bit Linux loader that I'm not even sure is in the Slax files at all, "ia32-something".
No "ubnldr", just "ia32", and I can't go deeper into the tree line, it stops there.
I've tried to disable UEFI completely, hoping against hope that the PC would let me boot from the Slax partition.
Fat chance of that.
I can boot from Windows alright, so the laptop is fully operable, but I've got a (momentarily) useless 2GB partition containg Slax, and eating at what little free space I have.