[RESOLVED] Can not boot after installing

[steve7233]

I just install a fresh install and now it won't boot!

[Schwarzer Kater]

There possibly is a wrong entry (or a corresponding missing device) in your /etc/fstab.
Boot e.g. from a live USB stick, mount the root directory of the system you wanted to boot from in the screenshot and check its /etc/fstab for this UUID.

I stand corrected.

[steve7233]

I tried two more times. Now I get:

instilation failed The bootloader could not be installed. The installation command <pre>grub install target=i386-pc -recheck -Force /dev/sda<pre> returned error code 1

Why does the Partition creator uses MiB and the message about the bios-grub partition say 8 MB? When I was a kid I was taught about KB, MB, GB, and TB. I graduated high school in 1984. Apparently in 1997 they changed and no one told me. How I supposed to figure out what size to make the partition? In my opinion the new installer is a bit confusing! I hope the devs change it to be easier to understand.

[RedGreen925]

I tried two more times. Now I get:

"instilation failed The bootloader could not be installed. The installation command <pre>grub install target=i386-pc -recheck -Force /dev/sda<pre> returned error code 1"

Why does the Partition creator uses MiB and the message about the bios-grub partition say 8 MB? When I was a kid I was taught about KB, MB, GB, and TB. I graduated high school in 1984. Apparently in 1997 they changed and no one told me. How I supposed to figure out what size to make the partition? In my opinion the new installer is a bit confusing! I hope the devs change it to be easier to understand.

Are you really using a MBR BIOS drive with a 32bit operating system? That is usual for any machine made in the last dozen or so years, for them it is 64bit OS with an EFI boot partition.

zeus@9600k:~$ df -h | grep efi
efivarfs        256K   65K  187K  26% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/nvme1n1p1  200M  6.2M  194M   4% /boot/efi

​

As you can see mine is 200M and yes the parasite corporations got the "standard" changed so they could claim their marketing lies for the hard drive mainly were correct. And have the internet flooded with the question of why does my 1TB hard drive get listed as 920GiB by the OS, the eight percent lie they do when calculating the size in decimal instead of binary as a computer does. So they co-opted the "standards" body to produce the MiB, GiB, TiB ... to show you are talking about binary sizes. I could give the complicated manual instructions to repair an EFI install but am clues less on the procedure on a MBR having never done it so here is a link.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Use this program from your install drive and let it do its thing.

[steve7233]

It is 64 bit so I don't know why it does the i386 stuff but that is grubs installer or something. Next time I try another install I will try a 200 M.

[Schwarzer Kater]

The Calamares installer complains if the ESP is < 300 MB, so I would make it 304 or 320 MB.
Also don't use "CSM booting" or other "legacy" BIOS compatibility settings during installation if you use UEFI.

[jlittle]

There possibly is a wrong entry (or a corresponding missing device) in your /etc/fstab.

It's not in the /etc/fstab, that's a grub error message,

I suspect, OP, you have booted the installer iso in BIOS/MBR mode, but the boot has found a leftover UEFI grub from a previous install. I suggest booting the installer again, carefully choosing a UEFI option, or disabling compatibility mode. Once the installer has booted in BIOS mode, it can only do a BIOS install, and in 2024 you probably don't want that.

[steve7233]

It's not in the /etc/fstab, that's a grub error message,

I suspect, OP, you have booted the installer iso in BIOS/MBR mode, but the boot has found a leftover UEFI grub from a previous install. I suggest booting the installer again, carefully choosing a UEFI option, or disabling compatibility mode. Once the installer has booted in BIOS mode, it can only do a BIOS install, and in 2024 you probably don't want that.

No. I switched to GPT as the installer said. I just tried again using a 60000 MiB I think that is 600 something MB -This conversion is frustrating-, and something unformatted flag set to bios-grub and it still errored:

[RedGreen925]

No. I switched to GPT as the installer said. I just tried again using a 60000 MiB I think that is 600 something MB -This conversion is frustrating-, and something unformatted flag set to bios-grub and it still errored:

That error still shows a grub BIOS install, it needs to be installing using the grub-efi binary to do an EFI install. Use in a Konsole window once booted into a try session the ls -l /sys/firmware/efi/efivars if it does not show you lots of things you are still booted in a BIOS mode and you need to go into the EFI firmware on your machine and disable the CSM compatability and set the boot option to UEFI Only. When booting the installer hit the for my board F12 key to load the one time boot option choose your drive to install from with the EFI:drive_name this will ensure an EFI boot. Once in the installer choose the use full disk option of the installer once you have confirmed the presence of the files in Konsole showing an EFI boot has occurred. If this does not work I will give the instructions to manually partition the disk in Konsole and then do a manual partitioning install steps. Only do the use full disk if there is nothing on the drive you wish to have left for use.

[steve7233]

That error still shows a grub BIOS install, it needs to be installing using the grub-efi binary to do an EFI install. Use in a Konsole window once booted into a try session the ls -l /sys/firmware/efi/efivars if it does not show you lots of things you are still booted in a BIOS mode and you need to go into the EFI firmware on your machine and disable the CSM compatability and set the boot option to UEFI Only. When booting the installer hit the for my board F12 key to load the one time boot option choose your drive to install from with the EFI:drive_name this will ensure an EFI boot. Once in the installer choose the use full disk option of the installer once you have confirmed the presence of the files in Konsole showing an EFI boot has occurred. If this does not work I will give the instructions to manually partition the disk in Konsole and then do a manual partitioning install steps. Only do the use full disk if there is nothing on the drive you wish to have left for use.

The last time I installed Kubuntu on this machine it wasn't frustrating at all but this installer is a major pita. talk about an epic fail on the Ubuntu devs attempt to make things easier!

[jglen490]

No. I switched to GPT as the installer said. I just tried again using a 60000 MiB I think that is 600 something MB -This conversion is frustrating-, and something unformatted flag set to bios-grub and it still errored:

MiB is "mebibyte". The prefix mebi comes from the binary system of data measurement that is based on powers of two. A mebibyte equals 2²⁰ or 1,048,576 bytes.. MB is "megabyte", and is based on powers of 10. A megabyte equals 10⁶ or 1,000,000 bytes. 60000 MiB is WAYY larger than 600 MB. That doesn't fix your UEFI problem, but might fix your sizing computation. If you're looking for a EPS partition size, 300MiB or 300MB is good, and gets you past that bad error message.

[steve7233]

That error still shows a grub BIOS install, it needs to be installing using the grub-efi binary to do an EFI install. Use in a Konsole window once booted into a try session the ls -l /sys/firmware/efi/efivars if it does not show you lots of things you are still booted in a BIOS mode and you need to go into the EFI firmware on your machine and disable the CSM compatability and set the boot option to UEFI Only. When booting the installer hit the for my board F12 key to load the one time boot option choose your drive to install from with the EFI:drive_name this will ensure an EFI boot. Once in the installer choose the use full disk option of the installer once you have confirmed the presence of the files in Konsole showing an EFI boot has occurred. If this does not work I will give the instructions to manually partition the disk in Konsole and then do a manual partitioning install steps. Only do the use full disk if there is nothing on the drive you wish to have left for use.

I don't recall seeing anything about CSM in the bios but I will look again. Why did Microsoft have to invent EFI since it is so difficult with any OS other than Windows?

[steve7233]

If I enable secure boot in the UEI bios and try to boot the live USB then I get an error. no boot partition.

[jlittle]

No. I switched to GPT as the installer said.

As RedGreen925 has pointed out, you're still doing a BIOS install. A BIOS install to GPT is possible; oshunluvr did that for many years, and perhaps still does.

If that really is what you want, BIOS/GPT, Kubuntu will not mind, but rather than an ESP (EFI System Partition) you need a "biosgpt" partition. And I would not be surprised if the new calamares installer does not do BIOS/GPT properly; to use calamares I imagine you'd have to

- "Try Kubuntu"
- start a konsole, and run sudo calamares
- not specify an ESP (it complains but lets you proceed)
- run grub-install manually from the konsole, specifying the boot device

However, in 2024 I'm finding it difficult to imagine that you don't want a UEFI install. And to get that you have to boot the installer in UEFI mode.

IIUC secure boot is not much relevant.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
And I would not be surprised if the new calamares installer does not do BIOS/GPT properly […]

I have tested this a few times now - at least in my tests BIOS/GPT always worked (I followed the method that the Calamares installer displayed and used Manual Partitioning), see:
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/forum/...822#post678822