Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss said on Fri, 28 Oct 2022 15:34:11 -0700 >Hi, > >I changed out a 240G SSD with a 500Gb SSD on a computer that had been >running Linux years ago. It is a Dell i-5 w/16Gb of RAM. Nice! >It was my daily driver until I had to move to Windows for business >reasons. The computer is 9 years old and hardly used. 16GB RAM was massive 9 years ago. > >I installed Kubuntu 22.04 on it. So far so good. Cool! >After the install it would not boot. If I hit the F12 key repeatedly, >while booting, I get a boot prompt that shows both my SSD and my hard >drive which is the original spinner. If I select the SSD drive it >boots right up. I assume you have absolutely no wish to boot to the spinner. If that's true, back up the spinner's data and then go into a partition software and remove the "bootable" flag from all partitions of the spinner. This *might* help. Question: Did you install Kubuntu AFTER you'd swapped the 500G drive where the 240G used to be? If not, you're dealing with a kernel not matching the rest of the OS, unless you dd'ed the 240 to the 500 beforehand. > >When I go into the bios it only shows the hard drive and an option for >booting. The SSD is not in the list of options. Did you flag the root partition on the SSD as bootable? If not, do that. It might help. Linux doesn't need the bootable flag, but some bioses rely on it. Let me guess: Is this one of those pitiful UEFI setups? Almost nobody correctly implements UEFI. If this machine doesn't dual boot, and if you can set the boot as MBR instead of UEFI this might help, but if your SSD is configured as GUID instead of old style MBR partitioning, doing so now would be a lot of work. >I changed the connects to the motherboard, switching the SSD to 1 and >the spinner to 2. There is no 0. This did not change things. > >Any thoughts on how to fix this problem? Your only real problem is that you need to F12 it into bios every time you boot, right? If you F12 it into the bios, you can select the SSD and boot. Depending on how often you boot this thing, this might be an acceptable state of affairs. If not, on UEFI machines you can usually trial and error for a couple hours and get the boot order approximately how you want it. In 2022, SSDs and NVMes bigger than 2TB partitions cost waaaay too much, so you lose nothing by formatting the root partition SSD as MBR, *if the computer lets you*. The best setups involve the SSD for /, and much cheaper per TB spinning rust for the rest that's mounted. Those spinning rust disks can be formatted with the superior GPT method, which allows much more than 2TB per disk. Here's the deal. If you format a disk GPT as opposed to MBR, then for that disk to be bootable you must use UEFI booting, which, even after all these years, isn't ready for prime time. Since you don't boot to your spinning rust, UEFI is a non-issue so you can GPT a 14TB spinner and get your full 14TB. One other advantage GPT has over MBR is with GPT you can have an infinite number of partitions. Well so what? Every Linux kernel since 2.4 has the ability to do bind mounts, so you just make your 14TB spinner one partition, and bind mount directories on that partition to mountpoints on your SSD. So every drive will have one partition. UUID is just another over-complexification with way too much cost and way too little benefit. Secure Boot could have been implemented in a better way, or at least have a dispenser of secure boot keys other than Microsoft. But follow the money, viewing the following from Wikipedia's UEFI page: * In 2011, Microsoft announced that computers certified to run its Windows 8 operating system had to ship with Microsoft's public key enrolled and Secure Boot enabled. * However, the proposal was criticized by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who attacked Red Hat for supporting Microsoft's control over the Secure Boot infrastructure. * On 26 March 2013, the Spanish free software development group Hispalinux filed a formal complaint with the European Commission, contending that Microsoft's Secure Boot requirements on OEM systems were "obstructive" and anti-competitive. All the big distros have the money to purchase keys from Microsoft. But the small distros don't, putting them in jeopardy, because most less than technically brilliant people can't jump through the hoops to work around secure boot. So far most mobo manufacturers allow you to turn off secure boot, but there's nothing to stop them from removing that switch. The day they do, the small distros vanish. And remember, Redhat and Debian were once small projects. Without small distros to compete and become big distros, the GNU/Linux operating system will increasingly be governed by big money interests, including Microsoft. What could POSSIBLY go wrong? UEFI is another example of a low benefit, high cost complexified replacement whose main benefits are to the big money guys like Microsoft, Redhat, Google, IBM, Intel etc. SteveT Steve Litt Summer 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss