[CONFIGURATION] Installation woes

[Tahaan]

I feel like a total newbie, very frustrated. I'm very out of touch with current situation with BIOS and boot options. I really expected things to just work.

I purchased a new laptop (MSI GP63 Leopart 8RE) to use as a development workstation.

Windows was pre-installed and worked pretty well, I even played a steam game for a couple of hours.

Then it became time to stop playing and start working so I tried to get it to dual boot - there was a D:-drive which it came with but here the pain started. With UEFI enabled the laptop booted straight into Windows, with LEGACY mode it would not boot except from the USB flash.

I tried a variety of combinations of options with Secure boot on and off (This option seems to disappear when LEGACY mode is selected) and Fast boot on and off.

Eventually I decided to just wipe everything and tell the installer to use the entire disk. That didn't make things any better.

Now it seems the computer is really unhappy - it freezes up. Sometimes on the loading screen, sometimes during the installer running.

I've also tried "normal" Ubuntu and KDE Neon.

And now I don't have Windows any more to see whether that still works at least.

Questions:
What is the correct options to select in the Bios to support dual boot, or at least let Linux work optimally. Windows is not really essential, I have not had Windows on my old laptop, from which I'm writing this, in 9 years (yes the laptop is that old)

How to I verify the hardware... I see a lot of "errors" when in terminal mode.

GPT? How does having GPT partitions affect everything else?

[claydoh]

In the bios (staying in EFI mode), you should have a setting to change boot orders somewhere, which should be set to USB as the first choice, and there should also be a hotkey to hit to bring up a boot device selection menu, where you can select which one to boot, and is usually one of the F-keys. This will be different for each manufacturer. A your laptop is set to boot the windows install, you do have to change this setting.

Also, the tool used to create the disk can have an effect, I recommend etcher, and Rufus is a good choice too, but is a touch more complicated. Etcher is dead simple, and has never failed me yet. Using this, you don't have to think about settings or GPT, or MBRs or anything. Just a few clicks. You shouldn't even have to turn off secure boot, though that is fine to do.
But you do still likely have to tell your computer to boot boot from the USB stick.

[Tahaan]

I created the flash drives on another KDE Neon system (my old laptop) and the boot order was definitely not the issue. I changed that as needed.

I solved the problem using
a) Reset Bios to Optimised Defaults. This fixed the hangs.
b) I got some hints about what is wrong with the KDE Neon installer by looking at the solutions other people had to use to get grub installed and booting. Long story short the Use Whole Disk option is broken. What worked forme was to create an EFI boot AND a Grub boot partition, and to install the boot loader in the grub boot partition explicitly.

My disk layout now looks like this:
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1 2048 2000895 1998848 976M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2 78241792 156366847 78125056 37.3G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p3 156366848 172367871 16001024 7.6G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p4 172367872 500117503 327749632 156.3G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p5 2000896 4001791 2000896 977M BIOS boot
/dev/nvme0n1p6 4001792 78239743 74237952 35.4G Linux filesystem

The start / ends are a bit wonky because I didn't create them in order. I created an extra Ext4 file system for stock ubuntu because I had more success with it. Its installer doesnt do the wrong thing with partions when you tell it to use the whole disk, but I didn't know it was because I had said to the installer to use Whole Disk Guided Mode - that really is the option that was causing my problems.

Since I had found that Ubuntu worked and could install grub, my "backup plan" was to install Ubuntu, use it to get Grub,and then use that to boot into KDE Neon.

Anyways turns out that wasn't needed so I'll probably make a plan to merge that space into another partition at some point.

Anyways I have a lot of configuration to do now. It's working. Except ... I now have a new question,for which I'll start a new thread now.

[Don B. Cilly]

/dev/nvme0n1p1? We definitely need to implement RFC 9999½

Er, no... what I don't get is, the EFI partition is for UEFI-mode boot, the BIOS one is for legacy mode, right?
So you have both in case you choose to boot in one or the other?

[Tahaan]

Actually I have both because I don't know what I'm doing :-D :-D :-D

Love the RFC quoted! Yes! where did eth0 and wifi0 go!?

[oshunluvr]

gdisk or fdisk can fix the partition order if you care enough to fix it.

eth0 and wifi0 are totally like 2015. Now your network devices use names specific to the device. My computer here has eno1 (ethernet) and wlp3s0 (wifi).