Installing ChromeOS Flex but Everything Goes Wrong…

I tried to install ChromeOS Flex on a laptop. This is what happened...

*Recorded on March 4th, 2022.

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Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It
Source: YouTube Audio Library

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #ChromeOS #Laptop

[averagewhiteguy]

Devs secretly make software and hardware not work on camera just to make sure Michael MJD is miserable when installing while recording.

[PCWindowstechguy]

This is absolutely my favorite series, because it is always funny seeing how many problems could occur in the setup due to some very light changes or just because of old hardware. Great content like always Michael MJD!

[WillOnSomething]

Honestly, ChromeOS Flex is ideal for machines like that Gateway or the HP Stream, which I honestly believe was designed to be a Chromebook, but a last-minute decision caused them to become Windows machines instead.

[romanvalenciano]

It’s really unusual that Flex was giving you that many issues. I’ve tried it on 3 “unsupported” devices (15’ 2014 MacBook Pro, Thinkpad T460, and even a Dell Optiplex 3060 MFF) and I had no issues at all. Everything worked. Anyways, great video as always!

[singletona]

As a beta tester for chromeOS (sadly don't still have the CR48) I approve of this firey trainwreck.

[jamesperih]

Good thing you didn’t attempt to partition. I found that older versions of CloudReady will actually remove ALL partitions, repartition, and install, without user intervention.

[seangraham]

it wouldn't be an MJD video without something going wrong lol but honestly man love the videos

[santosmurilo]

I just installed it on my ANCIENT MSI MS-1454 and boy, the Chrome OS Flex installed at the first time with no issues at all! It's running the OS flawlessly with no problems! That's my boy!

[Holdenwhite]

I cant believe I've been watching this since 2019. Love the content. Keep it up!

[elcael]

I know it's never an MJD video if everything goes smoothly... so damn, this gotta be the most MJD video I've seen so far 🤣

[rtsconsulting]

I was going to try this on some of my low spec old laptops, glad I didn't yet. Thanks for all your content, really enjoy it!

[dannymac]

Twice a day per timezone, there are probably people freaking out and wondering how the clock in the video matches the current time.

[Michael]

What's nice about your old laptop is that you can install an M-SATA along with a regular 2.5" SATA SSD *AND* it has a DVD drive! Makes it a champ for booting old media.

[Eyetrauma]

For a while I was all about the idea of Chromebooks. Every laptop I felt like it came with the trade off that it couldn’t do ‘serious’ work like my desktops could (I didn’t invest in a desktop-replacement class laptop), so inevitably I’d end up using them to just web browse.
But man alive, ChromeOS’ user ergonomics are *so bad.* I constantly felt like I was battling the OS just to do normal stuff.

[videocommenter]

Since you still had data you wanted to keep on that Acer laptop, I am so glad you didn’t try to do a dual boot, I am not sure if this has been fixed but if you install Chrome OS Flex, it will wipe out the whole drive (and other drives connected to the computer).

[igortroy]

If you update the recovery utility there's a new option -
Press cancel when it says "downloading" and you can "try again" while selecting dev channel.
It will say "developer unstable (dev)".
This gets you the latest build into the USB.
Setup screen will say ChromeOS Flex instead of Cloudready 2.0.

Doing this got the OS installed on a Chuwi tablet, where I was previously getting the same black screen you got.

[dntbther]

I really enjoy your retro computing videos, so why not try installing modern OSs ( in term of "still in development " ) that have ridiculously low hardware requirements like puppy Linux, damn small linux, kolibri os, haiku os, or others old forgotten/esoteric OSs

[commentarysheep]

I love it when he thinks he could do a simple, easy install of an OS on hardware designed for it, but then the OS is against his will and everything goes wrong.

Typical MJD.

[moelester]

I clicked on the notification immediately when I saw "everything goes wrong".

[Tepiloxtl]

In before time when I was experimentich with ChromeOS via Brunch, Ive ran into very similar issues and the crux ended up being that my machine didn't have support for SSE2 instruction set. Nothing I could do about that obviously... Maybe the Gateway is the same way?