Install HA on old laptop without UEFI

sda8 doesn’t get expanded until you boot for the first time. You should be able to create an sda9 at the end of the disk right after you copy the HassIO image to it. Make sure to say yes when gparted asks you whether to fix the disk

As for @blind-oracle 's instructions, just skip the part where I had you create the sda9 partition and mount the existing sda1 instead.