[SOLVED] HP Notebook - 15-DA0003

[Simon]

My son recently acquired this HP Notebook from a friend. The price was very reasonable. The laptop is about 2 years old at the most. 1 TB HDD, i3-core @ 2.2 Ghz. The story is his friend got tired of this one, and bought a "better" model. My son blew the Window 10 off and attempted several times to install Kubuntu 18.04 LTS to the HDD. The UEFI got in the way a lot and reading up on this it appears almost impossible to bypass the Windows 10 bootloader. My son got pissed off and erased the HDD using a method he read about online. He used the program dd to eradicate everything filling it with zeros.

After that he replaced the MBR and used the partition editor to format and set up the HDD in the following manner;

First extended block
Primary (Linux OS) boot 100 GB
Logical 50 GB (Linux OS) for emergency boot and maintenance
Swap (2 GB)
Second extended block
Logical the remainder of the 1 TB disk (blank for now)

After a lot of BIOS tweaking ... he finally got the machine to boot in both of the Linux blocks no issues. Then today he turned in on to add some more and he gets this error message after booting grub into the 150 GB OS, while the Kubuntu logo appears;

You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl reboot" to reboot, or "exit" to boot in default mode.

We tried and this seems to loop. He can still reboot into the 50 GB secondary OS, but I am questioning if the HDD is just bad, or the UEFI is back for revenge?
Because from what I read in the BIOS, the thing really wants us to use a Windows 10 bootloader and is very fussy about it.

[jglen490]

The install probably would be easier with UEFI (no Legacy, no CSM), Secure boot disabled, and SATA set to AHCI. With GPT partitioning vice ms-dos, and effectively no limit (sort of) on the number of partitions. You might want to give that a try.

I'm not running a laptop, but all that (above) makes it easier to "forget" anything about Windows. It's worked fine on my desktop unit for a couple fo years now.

[claydoh]

The install probably would be easier with UEFI (no Legacy, no CSM), Secure boot disabled, and SATA set to AHCI. With GPT partitioning vice ms-dos, and effectively no limit (sort of) on the number of partitions. You might want to give that a try.

I'm not running a laptop, but all that (above) makes it easier to "forget" anything about Windows. It's worked fine on my desktop unit for a couple fo years now.

+10001.
it is how I have been setting things up on all laptops and PCs, though secure boot *usually* works for me, except for that one that I have to compile a wifi driver for. it is easier to turn it off.

UEFI is sooo much simpler, in terms of end-user ease of use. No MBR to worry about getting overwritten.

[Simon]

This Danny and not Simon responding. I found I had the fstab messed up and edited it by booting the other partition. Problem solved. I don't share the easier theory on the UEFI as the laptop attempted to reinstall windows over and over again. It is not like I wanted to ditch the UEFI, it just refused to work with me. I am not sure how they have this setup, but there seems to be a hidden drive on the system that contains the windows 10. I don't plan on opening the case to find out. I think it is written to a programmable chip in there. All good now.