Unable to install grub in /dev/sda

[Phil Fraser]

Thank you all for your replies. I'm sure that everyone is sick of hearing
about my problems.

I have not tried Ventoy. I have two USB sticks, one for Windows 10 and one
for Xubuntu 21.10.

I have two disk drives with Windows 10 on them. The mechanical drive also
has Xubuntu 21.10. The only Linux that I can install on the SSD is Debian 9
with a Raspberry Pi desktop. Everything else fails with a cannot install
grub error. I have spent a week trying every suggestion that I can find.
Both drives show that Windows is installed in legacy mode. I didn't select
the mode, it just happened. The mechanical drive works and the SSD doesn't.
As far as I can tell, fdisk shows the format of both to be the same. The
mechanical drive doesn't fit into the laptop correctly and it doesn't have
enough capacity for my needs, plus it's very slow.

I'm on the verge of reformatting the SSD drive and trying again to install
Windows and Linux. I don't have any data on the Windows partition. I only
use one app and that is to update the maps on my Garmin navigator.

One last thing, the boot setting is both. If I select legacy then the usb
sticks won't boot.


On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 22:41, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Oct 2021 at 12:19, Phil Fraser <phillor9 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> Did you try Ventoy as I suggested?
>
> > 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.
>
> The brand should not matter.
>
> What matters is this:
>
> • If you installed Windows in UEFI boot mode, you _must_ install
> xBuntu in  UEFI mode too. You cannot mix them.
> • You should only have 1 ESP per drive. Use custom partitioning and
> mount the ESP to /boot/efi
> • You do not install GRUB to the MBR with UEFI boot. It installs a
> shim in the ESP.
> • You will need a separate tiny partition of type BIOS_BOOT for the rest
> of GRUB
>
> Personally, I find all this too complex. So on my 420 I disabled UEFI
> boot, partitioned with MBR, no ESP, and reinstalled Ubuntu in BIOS
> mode.
>
> It sounds to me like this may be your best option but you will, I
> think, have to reinstall Windows.
>
> ISO files are a free download from
> https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/software-download/windows10ISO
>
> A single 16GB USB key can hold both at once with Ventoy.
>
> Move your Windows data files to a separate partition first, then back
> them up, and then you can just restore them later.
>
> Here's how my disk is laid out:
>
> [Windows reserved]
> [Windows C drive]
> Extended partition
>     {
>       [Shared data drive, NTFS]
>       [Ubuntu root]
>       [Ubuntu home]
>       [Ubuntu swap]
>     }
>
> --
> 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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>
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