Linux Installation (1 Viewer)

[Zack Lee]

ok, got everything working. Tried to repeat the boot-repair steps and it always stops me with the 404 error on the sudo update line

 

[Hedon James]

You're using version 17.04, which is no longer supported.

LTS versions are supported for 5 years, while non-LTS are only supported for 9 months. LTS versions are always even year numbers, and ending in 04; such as 14.04, 16.04, with 18.04 about to be released in about 60 days. Your Kubuntu 17.04 is April 2017 and you are just beyond the 9-month time frame for support. Either download a 17.10 version, or a 16.04 version, and create a LiveCD from that.

In the future, I'd just stick with LTS versions, for the very reasons you're currently experiencing. Even the LTS versions get updated every six months. Technically, version 16.04 is currently version 16.04.3. The in-between releases, ie 16.10, 17.04, and 17.10 are just "beta" versions for the next LTS release. But that's your decision to make...

 

[Zack Lee]

ok, Im about to go work a late shift but I will get a newer non beta
version tomorrow.

 

[Zack Lee]

Without having the dvd yet, I’m curious if an updated version is going to be hard to install given the system isn’t even recognizing the old version. Should I just format the partition?

 

[Hedon James]

Without having the dvd yet, I’m curious if an updated version is going to be hard to install given the system isn’t even recognizing the old version. Should I just format the partition?

I was assuming we are fixing your existing Kubuntu 17.04 installation. The only reason we need a different DVD is so that we can install Yanni Boot Repair in a live session, to repair your GRUB bootloader. You're getting 404 errors "file not found", because your 17.04 version is no longer supported. The most recent supported versions are 16.04 or 17.10, with 16.04 being LTS. I'd recommend 16.04, as 17.10 will no longer be supported after July 2018.

Let's just download 16.04 and burn to a Live DVD; boot into a Live session; and proceed with the Boot Repair tutorial in the referenced post.

The only reason we'll need to install is if there's some other catastrophic error we don't know about yet; we can "nuke" your existing installation and install the supported 16.04 version. But we're not there yet.

Are you familiar with gPartEd? I'd like to see a snapshot of your partition layout to see if you've mixed and matched GPT and MBR partitions.

 

[Zack Lee]

The only reason we'll need to install is if there's some other catastrophic error we don't know about yet; we can "nuke" your existing installation and install the supported 16.04 version. But we're not there yet.

Are you familiar with gPartEd? I'd like to see a snapshot of your partition layout to see if you've mixed and matched GPT and MBR partitions.

I got you. Yes, I used gParted before. I am going to snag a dvd this a.m. and do all of that today.

 

[Zack Lee]

well its booting into kubuntu. Is it normal for grub to move on to a default boot if you don't respond within 30 sec or so? It is just booting into kubuntu. I have not tried to get back to windows yet. This is the gparted screen. Thanks for all the help! I am excited about working in this system.

 

[Hedon James]

well its booting into kubuntu. Is it normal for grub to move on to a default boot if you don't respond within 30 sec or so? It is just booting into kubuntu. I have not tried to get back to windows yet. This is the gparted screen. Thanks for all the help! I am excited about working in this system.

It is indeed normal for GRUB to continue with default boot within a specified time frame. 30 sec seems a long time though...I think my Lubuntu system is more like 9 seconds. It can be adjusted but I've never had to. Until then, just hit enter and it'll boot immediately.

Referencing your gPartEd screenshot....what the heck is going on there?!

First and foremost, you have a GPT partition scheme, as MBR can only handle 4 partitions. But your partitions confuse me a little. EXT4 partitions are linux, so:

sda7 is your Kubuntu OS
sda8 is your Kubuntu /home (and kudos to you for setting it up that way!)
sda9 is a linux "swap" partition, and 4GB (3.76GiB) is sufficient

These all look fine. "unallocated" is interesting, as you have 165GB of drive space being used for nothing. would be easiest to merge into the sda8 /home partition. sda4 appears to be used for nothing, but is only 128MB. Not worth worrying about at the moment.

sda5 is your Win8 installation, and is nearly full (655GB of 671GB are used), and sda2 is your EFI/boot partition. GRUB is likely installed here. I'm not sure what sda3, labeled "LRS-ESP" is.

What are sda1 (labeled WINRE_DRV) and sda6 (labeled PBR_DRV)? They are windows related, as they're formatted NTFS, which is specific to Windows.

So sda3, sda1 and sda6 are questions for me. Any ideas what they might be?

 

[Hedon James]

Also, boot into Kubuntu and pull up a terminal and type

sudo update-grub

and see if GRUB will find Windows 8 on its own. if it doesn't, we'll need to figure out why not and look into a fix from there.

 

[zeetes]

grub can be easily customized too using vi or whatever text editor you are comfortable with. different .cfg files for directory, menus etc.

 

[Zack Lee]

the grub seems to be working fine. I am in windows now. I am not a patient person and generally walk away during a boot.

I have no idea on the partitions but I will research it. The computer has been upgraded to Win10. But when I made it dual boot the only thing I did was set up the additional /home. :dunno:

prolly a lenovo thing. Their Bios menu is completely different and it was throwing me off during that whole process.

 

[Hedon James]

the grub seems to be working fine. I am in windows now. I am not a patient person and generally walk away during a boot.

I have no idea on the partitions but I will research it. The computer has been upgraded to Win10. But when I made it dual boot the only thing I did was set up the additional /home. :dunno:

prolly a lenovo thing. Their Bios menu is completely different and it was throwing me off during that whole process.

So everything is working as you expect it again?

 

[Hedon James]

the grub seems to be working fine. I am in windows now. I am not a patient person and generally walk away during a boot.

I have no idea on the partitions but I will research it. The computer has been upgraded to Win10. But when I made it dual boot the only thing I did was set up the additional /home. :dunno:

prolly a lenovo thing. Their Bios menu is completely different and it was throwing me off during that whole process.

aha...the WINRE_DRV labeled partition is your recovery partition to reinstall windows. SYSTEM_DRV is Lenovo's implementation of the BIOS you reference. PBR_DRV is Lenovo's one-key recovery software. I'd say these should all be left alone.

Wanna recover your 165GB of unallocated disk space and merge it into your Kubuntu /home (data) directory?

 

[Zack Lee]

actually I think I need to scoop it back into my windows partition. I do not have any plans to use linux as a major storage system at this point as all of my stuff is in windows format and on several hard drives. I mainly want to just learn linux and gimp at this point.

 

[FL_Saint]

Sorry to intrude on this thread. I just installed xubuntu on a thinkpad 11e with an A4 CPU. Seems to be working well, but I had a heck of a time trying to figure out the wireless card driver package.

I also messed up and selected the disk encryption - even though I didn't think I did. Unless there is a way to automatically decrypt by storing PW or something, I may go back and reinstall. But I really don't want to go through the wireless card headache again.