Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[sgreger1]

I tried writing it to Sda but it says cannot find device. Glad it didn't work since I don't want to delete my windows.

So is this what every user has to do to install Ubuntu? Jesus Christ I can see why this isn't more widely used lol.

Almost 3 days now and I still don't have it running

[lxskllr]

sda. Case makes a difference in Linux. sDA, SdA, SDA are all different files, and that applies to commands also. It's actually pretty easy to install, and it takes care of everything. The EasyBCD is what gummed up the works I think.

Edit:
Ya think this is a PITA? Try installing XP after you've installed Win7 :^D

Edit2:
For the grub version, you need grub-efi-amd64 which should be on the cd.

[sgreger1]

It's on /dev/sda. I can guarantee you that you didn't manage to install to an NTFS partition. Ubuntu is on /dev/sda5-9. Try running df -h /dev/sda5 in order to figure out which partition's are which. Just do df -h for each of those linux partitions, and it'll tell you your size so you can figure out which are which.

Also, you're not going to be able to install grub to the disks without mounting them. That was part of the purpose of the chroot I suggested to you earlier. When you chroot, you'll be mounting the necessary parts of the partitions you installed to, and then changing to those partitions as your new root, rather than the liveCD. Also, since your install is on /dev/sda, that's probably where you wan to install grub to. Still, like I said before, a typical grub install will NOT work with a UEFI boot. One way or another, you're going to need to grab the grub2-uefi package and get it installed on your system if you want to be able to boot to Ubuntu. lx should be able to confirm this for me.



And no, not every user has to do this. You're getting extra fun because you've got all sorts of things with your system that are relatively new. UEFI boots have only been implemented since last spring, so this is pretty much the first wave of efforts to work with it in linux. Also, you may as well use grub2-uefi rather than the corresponding grub-uefi package, if such a package even exists. Grub will be deprecated sooner or later, and it'll be easier to just set GRUB2 up once now.

Okay I will do this now and figure out which partition is which. I will have to figure out how to get a copy of gub2-uefi somehow.

[sgreger1]

sda. Case makes a difference in Linux. sDA, SdA, SDA are all different files, and that applies to commands also. It's actually pretty easy to install, and it takes care of everything. The EasyBCD is what gummed up the works I think.

Edit:
Ya think this is a PITA? Try installing XP after you've installed Win7 :^D

Oh I didn't know case mattered, thanks for the heads up. I undid what EasyBCD did though and reinstalled the whole thing, I think shiki is right and it's a UEFI thing. I am not familiar with how the BIOS works so I didn't know it was that new.

[sgreger1]

Okay, ran df -h /dev/sdaX on each partition. All of them say 4.9 GB so that can't be right.

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda5
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda6
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda7
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda8
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ df -h /dev/sda9
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 4.9G 4.0K 4.9G 1% /dev

[shikitohno]

sgreger, I hate to harp on this and sound like an old record, but those links to the section about chroot and GRUB2 on the archwiki are likely the easiest way to do this. I haven't touched Ubuntu in years, so I've got no clue what the installer is like. Is there any stage where you can choose extra packages to install? If there is, you can probably look and find the grub2-uefi package as an option. If that's the case, install that and if possible, untick whatever other versions of grub it'll try and install. Then at the end of the install, before you reboot, hit ctrl+alt+F3, and login as root. Then install a GRUB2 boot record with the grub2-uefi. Once everything else is done, you should be able to safely skip any installation of grub built into the installer/ignore error messages, and reboot. If you can't do it from within the installation, chroot is your friend. Like I said before, I know it might seem rather overwhelming, but it may be the easiest, or even only, way to get this working. And chroot is also a great tool to have at your command, because if you bork your system later on when it's actually installed and running, 10-20 minutes in chroot can save you 30-45 minutes reinstalling again.

Well, I don't know what to make of that. Something isn't right there. Perhaps the partitioning didn't go off as well as you thought. Actually, I lied. If you somehow managed to create GPT disks (which your fdisk output implies) Ubuntu just flat out will not work for this. Not without some heavy duty linux-fu that I think we can agree might be a bit beyond you. Feel like compiling a custom kernel sgreger1?

[sgreger1]

sgreger, I hate to harp on this and sound like an old record, but those links to the section about chroot and GRUB2 on the archwiki are likely the easiest way to do this. I haven't touched Ubuntu in years, so I've got no clue what the installer is like. Is there any stage where you can choose extra packages to install? If there is, you can probably look and find the grub2-uefi package as an option. If that's the case, install that and if possible, untick whatever other versions of grub it'll try and install. Then at the end of the install, before you reboot, hit ctrl+alt+F3, and login as root. Then install a GRUB2 boot record with the grub2-uefi. Once everything else is done, you should be able to safely skip any installation of grub built into the installer/ignore error messages, and reboot. If you can't do it from within the installation, chroot is your friend. Like I said before, I know it might seem rather overwhelming, but it may be the easiest, or even only, way to get this working. And chroot is also a great tool to have at your command, because if you bork your system later on when it's actually installed and running, 10-20 minutes in chroot can save you 30-45 minutes reinstalling again.

I'm reading it now and trying to make sense of it. When it says uname -m for example I am not sure if that means username -m or if I should actually enter uname. It says to mount to partition but I don't know which to mount since they all have the same disk size somehow.

[shikitohno]

No, those commands would be entered exactly as written, however, in light of fdisk complaining about GPT, I think it's pretty safe to say that this particular install of Ubuntu is absolutely not going to work. For sh¡ts and giggles, why don't you try downloading a fedora iso? If the problem really is what I suspect it to be, then it's rather likely that a fedora install with be something that you can pull off with significantly less legwork.

[sgreger1]

No, those commands would be entered exactly as written, however, in light of fdisk complaining about GPT, I think it's pretty safe to say that this particular install of Ubuntu is absolutely not going to work. For sh¡ts and giggles, why don't you try downloading a fedora iso? If the problem really is what I suspect it to be, then it's rather likely that a fedora install with be something that you can pull off with significantly less legwork.

Ok, I guess Ubuntu just isn't compatible with any computers made this year? That totally sucks I will go get Fedora and see if I can get that to work better. Let me go download it and figure it out real quick and i'll be back. Edit: So do I need to go in and delete all of my partitions I made and uninstall ubuntu?

[lxskllr]

What do you make of this shikitohno?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

[sgreger1]

What do you make of this shikitohno?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

Good g, you have to have all of these programs downloaded just to unpack/build GRUB2?

bison autoconf automake flex autogen python (2.x series) (for autogen.sh if building from bzr repo) texinfo help2man gettext (NLS support) device-mapper freetype2 (libs)

[lxskllr]

Good g, you have to have all of these programs downloaded just to unpack/build GRUB2?

It's fairly easy to do by copy/pasting in the command line. It's not like you have to go to a website, and download them one at a time.

[shikitohno]

What do you make of this shikitohno?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

It's certainly possible to pull off an UEFI boot on Ubuntu, and from what I've read a few minutes ago, the x86_64 installer should take care of things automatically at the moment as far as detecting UEFI boots and installing the appropriate form of GRUB2. The issue lies in sgreger's GUID Partition Table, from what I can figure. I'm simply pushing Fedora at the moment because with all things considered, sgreger either finds out it's just as badly mangled there, or it'll work out of the box and everyone's happy. Based on what I've read trying to figure out these problems he's had, I think it should all go fairly nicely, and he should even be able to install to that 3TB drive with it if he wants.

Also, I'm half tempted to just see if there's a way to install Ubuntu or Fedora over ssh.
I'm fairly confident I could pull off either properly if it were feasible, and I'd be happy to walk him through forwarding port 22 and starting up sshd if it were possible, as I'd like to just get all this worked out for him so he can start learning the new system, rather than getting pissed off at it because he can't even get it running. Overall, this seems like it's at risk of turning into a fairly negative first experience for him if we can't get this sorted, and it'd be a shame if that were to happen.

Edit2: Some google-fu reveals that it would be possible to for me to do the heavy lifting for sgreger if he wanted to try and cheat some. The only thing I don't like about it is that the page that explains it says you may not be able to do custom partitions, in which case I'd have to bail out. Still, if sgreger's down, I'd be game to give it a try and see if I couldn't do some magic and get him a functional install with minimal effort and tearing of hair on his part.

[sgreger1]

It's certainly possible to pull off an UEFI boot on Ubuntu, and from what I've read a few minutes ago, the x86_64 installer should take care of things automatically at the moment as far as detecting UEFI boots and installing the appropriate form of GRUB2. The issue lies in sgreger's GUID Partition Table, from what I can figure. I'm simply pushing Fedora at the moment because with all things considered, sgreger either finds out it's just as badly mangled there, or it'll work out of the box and everyone's happy. Based on what I've read trying to figure out these problems he's had, I think it should all go fairly nicely, and he should even be able to install to that 3TB drive with it if he wants.

Also, I'm half tempted to just see if there's a way to install Ubuntu or Fedora over ssh.
I'm fairly confident I could pull off either properly if it were feasible, and I'd be happy to walk him through forwarding port 22 and starting up sshd if it were possible, as I'd like to just get all this worked out for him so he can start learning the new system, rather than getting pissed off at it because he can't even get it running. Overall, this seems like it's at risk of turning into a fairly negative first experience for him if we can't get this sorted, and it'd be a shame if that were to happen.

Edit2: Some google-fu reveals that it would be possible to for me to do the heavy lifting for sgreger if he wanted to try and cheat some. The only thing I don't like about it is that the page that explains it says you may not be able to do custom partitions, in which case I'd have to bail out. Still, if sgreger's down, I'd be game to give it a try and see if I couldn't do some magic and get him a functional install with minimal effort and tearing of hair on his part.

Man that would be outstanding if you could at least help me make any amount of progress on this. You can take over the whole computer if you want and do whatever. I can watch and learn from the experience. I at least know how to make partitions so hopefully we can fill in the gaps if it boots you out!

[sgreger1]

It's fairly easy to do by copy/pasting in the command line. It's not like you have to go to a website, and download them one at a time.

Oh okay I didn't realize it came pre-packaged. I thought I would have to go track them down and figure out how to open them from within ubuntu.