Fairly well schooled in windows, but HA is the first time I have touched Linux. Trying to load a bare metal installation and having nothing but issues. Was given a Lenovo Thinkcentre m91p that was looking for a use, and decided on HA. Using a 500gb Samsung SSD. Set the BIOS in the Lenovo to UEFI, but it did not have a secure boot option in the BIOS to turn off. Downloaded the .xz file, put on a flash drive, booted the Lenovo into Ubuntu and did the Restore partition in disks to the Samsung SSD (may be a bad drive - also have used a Hitachi 500gb mechanical drive). The first couple of times Ubuntu hung as soon as the restore partition operation completed. After multiple attempts, decided to try the balena etcher option. However when using the program I get an error when selecting the file - which of course I can’t replicate now. Instead the balena etcher will not show the target drive (SSD or Mechanical) to write to, although both show up in device manager, disk manager, and explorer to use. Reilized that issue with the ubuntu method may have been that I needed to unpack the .xy file reading the balena instructions, so put the unpacked file on my flash and tried to do the ubuntu restore partition again and still nothing (seems as if the drive is not being written to at all). When rebooting into HA bare metal drive after doing the partition restore all I get is a flashing cursor. Help - been working on this for three days!!
Update: Ran across a recommendation to load Ubuntu on the drive I was going to use for HAOS and successfully did so. I also read that Balena has some kind of ad ware issue that may cause problems. Will attempt to use USBimager to install from my Live OS when I get back today. The documentation does not seem to say anything about it, but is using an etcher in Ubuntu necessary (that may be one of my issues??)