I hope it’s OK to post to this community to ask for help. If not, just let me know where I should go.

The Initial Situation

I have an old Aspire E1-472G with a GeForce 820M, which I’d like to give to my son who loves to play “There’s poop in my soup.” The laptop was fine with Mint for Office stuff and browsing, but I couldn’t get it to use the 820m to play games: it would always default to the onboard video card. I tried switching to the Nvidia drivers but all I got was a black screen. So I decided to format and install a gaming-friendly version of Linux. I opted for Pop!_OS, since it looked like it may solve my 820 m problem.

The Problem

I created a Pop!_OS boot USB drive, installation went fine, used defaults for partitions, rebooted, took out the USB drive and… “Operating System not found.”

What I did

Checked boot order: SSD drive is #2, right after USB.

Boot mode: Legacy Bios, but I’ve tried UEFI also–same result.

Tried reinstalling: same

Looked for help online: After reading dozens of posts and their solutions, I can’t get it to work but I suspect it has something to do with Boot Mode or the partitioning, but I can’t figure it out.

My level of skill

I come from Windows and I have installed Mint a few times. I can copy paste stuff in the Terminal, but really, I’m pretty much useless besides that.

What I Hope to Get

I’m not set on POP_OS so if there’s an easier solution, I’m all ears. I think I’m just overlooking something that would be obvious to a more experienced person.

Thanks for your help!

** Update 2024-11-03**

I had some time this morning to tinker with it.

Things I've tried

1-Manually change boot order/put ssd first in BIOS: same result

2-Tried reinstalling while manually doing the partition: same result.

3-While rebooting with boot key, I checked the files on the SSD: I'm no expert, but everything seems there. bin, boot, dev, etc, home, ...

4-Currently downloading the boot repair disk octopus_ink recommendend. It's 2.6G so it's taking a while.

Options I got left

1-Update the bios: seems easier said than done. I'm gonna have to read up on that. 2-Probably my next move: just give up and try another distro! I'm looking at Nobara. https://nobaraproject.org/

Thanks for the suggestions. If ever I get it to work, I'll report back.