Unable to install grub in /dev/sda

[Phil Fraser]

Hopefully, this will be my last question on this topic. The level of
frustration this has caused me, together with the flakey Internet
connection, has almost caused me to toss the whole lot into the bin. I've
completely exhausted all possibilities that I'm aware of to install Xubuntu
21.10 on my SSD equipped Thinkpad T420.

I have installed Xubuntu 21.10 alongside Windows 10 on a mechanical drive
but I cannot get past the installation of grub on the SSD. Debian 9 with a
Raspberry Pi desktop (32 bit version) is the only version of several
distributions that has been successful. I now suspect that the SSD has some
some of compatibility problem. I'm reluctant to reformat the drive because
it still has a working version of Windows 10 on it even though I cannot
access it (except with Raspberry Pi Debian 9 version) because of the grub
problem.

The default boot mode is both UEFI and legacy with legacy mode first. If I
change that to legacy only, then the USB stick (built with startup disk
creator) won't boot.

My first SSD was a Samsung. Everything was good except that I could't
reboot Linux even though Windows 7 would reboot. I now have a Crucial MX500
2.5 SSD which was good until I tried to overwrite version 20.10 with a
later version. Both SSDs are 1TB. Can anyone recommend a SSD that's known
to be suitable to use with my Thinkpad T420? I have a no-brand 110GB SSD
that I might try tomorrow. It's too small to be useful.

On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 at 21:21, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 at 12:38, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
> >
> > On 18/10/2021 10:11, Liam Proven wrote:
> > [...]
> > > All Ubuntus *should* react the same.
> >
> > 🤣🤣🤣
> >
> > In theory, yes. In practice every flavour is different: some recognise
> > this hardware, some that, and some not at all. It *is* getting better,
> > but also worse, as support for older hardware is dropped. Fortunately
> > there are still distros targeted at older systems, but you'd be amazed
> > at how few support SCSI tape drives even.
>
> It's interesting to hear this. I have not tried very much, I admit.
>
> People don't talk enough about OpenGL and the need for working 3D
> drivers. A bunch of "modern" desktops are based on OpenGL rendering
> and _need_ 3D to work. Sometimes if it's not there, they will work via
> software rendering, but performance is poor this way. GNOME and its
> fork Cinnamon need it. As Elementary/Pantheon is also a GNOME 3 fork,
> I'd guess the same applies there too.
>
> KDE officially doesn't, and you can turn it off, but in my testing
> turning it on or off doesn't actually help and in testing using OpenGL
> passthrough in VirtualBox, neither way worked and there was serious
> display corruption rendering it unusable. I suspect the enable/disable
> functionality has not been properly tested and is or was buggy.
>
> Unity needed it but by modern standards is quite lightweight and works
> OK with software rendering. This is why there are problems: modern
> CPUs are so fast, software OpenGL is good enough and people don't
> notice the problems.
>
> MATE can use it but doesn't need it; it's a fork of GNOME 2 which
> predates this stuff.
>
> XFCE and LXDE/LXQt don't need or use it directly at all, and I *think*
> have it off by default (depending on distro, obviously) but you can
> enable an add-on compositor for transparency effects and shadows if
> you want.
>
>
> --
> Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
> Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lproven at gmail.com
> Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven
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> 702-829-053
>
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