Hello KGIII & guiverc,
Thank you for your quick replies; your suggestions got me thinking that perhaps I’m framing my problem in the wrong way. I had to install 20.04.1 via Win10 (wouldn’t let me access bootable USB directly) & it appears to ignore my boot order since:
FYI: current boot device order:
USB storage
Internal storage
network boot-IPV6
network boot-IPV4
Windows boot manager
I want to perform a fresh install to remove whatever it is that’s causing this problem, so what would you suggest? Thank you.
When KGIII pinged me, I think it was because I used an old thinkpad to continue testing ISOs even though it had no bootable thumb-drives (it’s USB ports were dead, and the replacement ones the machine wouldn’t boot from). I’m not sure that will work. (it requires grub to be your bootloader which you don’t have as I understand it; I last used it August & September 2020 for testing of 18.04.5)
I used grub or the boot-loader to point to the ISO I had copied and existed on a file-system, and the ISO booted from there.
I’ve done the same thing long ago with windows 2000, and again 2002/XP using the windows boot loader (ie. having it boot an ISO stored on its own NTFS partition), however I don’t know if it’ll work with later windows (I recall using it later, but I can’t recall if it was vista or 7, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work on later versions). Also given that it was so long ago, it doesn’t mean it’ll work with modern ISOs that boot differently (there was no uEFI then which complicated booting and caused changes).
Sorry, currently I have nothing more I can think of.
Hello guiverc & KGIII,
It was suggested in an earlier reply to explore using KDE Partition Manager in looking for the source of my problem. I’m too new to Linux to understand what I’m looking at so I hope something jumps out at you from the following information.
I was able to install 20.04.1 on my ASUS netbook without a problem. Here are the KDE partition tables for the ASUS HD & the bootable USB:
Hi. My level of expertise is basic, but something struck me about this from my own past experiences. Are you trying to dual boot?
I had issues when I tried to install to a separate physical drive, bootloader stayed as the default. Spent a lot of time fiddling to no avail…
Anyway it sounds like your problem started when you weren’t able to boot the Lubuntu installer from usb?
If you want to get usb to boot, do you have access to a cd / dvd writeable drive? You’ve potential solutions there to put either the live disk image straight on, or use PLoP bootloader - which can also be put on your windows boot partition I believe. Which will miraculously enable booting from USB for you if your bios doesn’t provide the option to do so.
I used this to test a few distros on an old Centrino Win XP laptop the other day and it worked a treat, although I used live disk rather than the mbr method. The instructions were pretty good so may help you run installer from USB which will hopefully help put grub2 as your boot manager.
One other thing I encountered a bit back was a setting in bios (I say bios it is UEFI perhaps) that basically locked the motherboard to Windows, took a bit of digging and once it was gone I finally managed to get Ubuntu on my desktop. This was after replacing my motherboard due to a short on the original, so I didn’t really know what I was receiving until I put it in the box. Will see if I can look at the setting again to give you another avenue of inquiry.
Thank you for the quick reply acor,
My level is <basic so I’m looking for any help that I can get. I don’t understand why I could boot from my ext drive, but only thru Win10, to install 20.04.1 & now can’t recognize external drives.
Hello again,
I’ve saved the link that you provided & have been reading Bill Shotts’ book on the Linux Command Line; I hope these resources help me solve my problem. Thank you.
The reason I ask is that plopKexec is the version that worx with UEFI, based on the comparison chart, but there are two options: plopkexec-1.6-bin.tar.gz & plopkexec-1.6.tar.gz; I don’t know what any of that means so which version would you recommend that I download? Thank you.
I don’t think you necessarily want to run from UEFI or BIOS. If you have a running copy of windows you can install to mbr from there. The version you are looking at needs to be compiled in terminal from what I can see. So you would download either file. They’re both just compressed archives that need building to get the iso.
Which by the sounds of your case you would want to install on mbr. Both versions have really clear instructions though.
If you have a CD/DVD Writer you can burn the iso to disc once you get at it and that will boot too. However if you can do this you’d probably just want to create a Lubuntu install DVD and bypass this idea entirely.
With Boot Manager 5 I just downloaded the zip and burned the iso contained within it (I ignored the other files) to CD-Rom in my case. I used Brasero on Ubuntu, to clone the image onto the disc. So it didn’t get too technical for me.
Are your installs of Windows and Lubuntu on the same physical drive? You’ve only got one internal hard drive?
Thank you acor,
I tried to replace Win10 w/20.04.1 & it appears that I have remnants of Win10 on my HD & can’t boot from an external drive. I hope plop lets me access an external drive to install a clean version of 20.04.1 to replace the mess on my HD.
Hello again,
I downloaded plop-5.0.15, extracted the files, & get two files with what look like windows icons called plpinst.com & plpinstc.com that are DOS/windows executable, so I’m looking for a little advice here. How do I install this pkg directly to my HD & work around the windows parts that are messing up my install of 20.04.1? Am I missing something in the install instructions provided in the pkg.? Thank you.
Hi Sorry I originally assumed you still had windows installed, plop bootloader won’t install to mbr without windows from what I can make of the instructions. I expect is the same for the version that writes to bios or uefi.
Do you have a CD/DVD writer on the device, or even a non-writeable one?
Brilliant. The CD worked a treat for me, although one time it seemed to interfere with the Lubuntu install on one device. So I took it out once had booted to the first screen of Lubuntu Installer.
; I have a 64bit machine & somewhere in plop’s instructions it suggests that I can copy bootx64.efi to the EFI/boot directory on the EFI system partition rather than burning a CD. Do you know how to do that? Thanks.
Well, I burned a CD using K3b & lost my internet connection (which I just restored); did that happen to you with plop? Should plop boot when I turn on my computer, or do I have to start it? Thanks.
You will normally need to get the boot menu open at first, it’s normally one of the higher F-Keys. Or enter Bios / Uefi settings and make it the first priority in boot settings.
A CD / DVD would normally only autorun if there’s no boot present on your hard drive.
I used Brasere to burn the cd and didn’t experience any problems, but I already had the file downloaded and extracted so dropping the internet wouldn’t have caused any issues in my case.
