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View Full Version : 12.04 Live CD 1st screen is Unreadable



LarryMcMains
April 12th, 2013, 04:51 PM
I'm trying to install 12.04 LTS on a new Toshiba Satellite notebook (Intel i7 proc, 64-bit, 12 gb memory, Intel Mobile HD graphics). The Live CD was successfully created (checksum OK), but when I boot from it, the first screen displayed is an unreadable mess of single pixel high lines. (A graphics mode problem, I assume?) It appears to be a menu of some sort because the up/down cursor keys change the display twice in either direction (3 options?) I took a chance and hit enter on the "top" (default) "option" and Ubuntu did boot up and run successfully from the CD. There is an "install" icon on the unity desktop, but I've been hesitant to try it - not knowing what kind of a mode I'm in and whether I'm going to get to a Grub option to re-partition and install along side Windows 8. Any suggestions on how I might avoid the first screen corruption or if it's safe to proceed with installation via the 2nd screen that I do get to?

Second question: I'm getting to the Toshiba boot menu by holding down F12 during power-on. I have not found a way to disable quickbook/fastboot as suggested - Am I headed for trouble with this down the road?

Thanks

Larry McMains

fantab
April 12th, 2013, 05:18 PM
Since Ubuntu booted to a Live Desktop then over all the CD seems fine. Yes, you CAN install safely from the desktop.

However, I presume you have read all about booting Ubuntu with WINDOWS8. As there seem to be issues with "Secure Boot" and UEFI. Do check these (search this forum) before you proceed. This also pertains to your second question. AFAIK there is no trouble down the road... if you do your research properly.

Good Luck....

Routhinator
April 12th, 2013, 09:42 PM
I would also verify the integrity of your installation CD in case the ISO you burned was corrupted.. this certainly sounds like a possibility with what you have described.

LarryMcMains
April 12th, 2013, 11:04 PM
OK, I've found the boot speed setting and it is off. Secure Boot is enabled, but the instructions say to try with it enabled (support is in 12.04 64-bit?), so I've left it on for now. I could not get to the CD menu to select an integrity check on the Toshiba, but I was able to do so on my old Lenovo and it ran successfully.

New Problem (in addition to the initial mystery screen): The install process complains that I should have network access during the install but don't. And indeed, neither wired nor wireless networks are available while I'm booted from the LiveCd to the Ubuntu desktop. The lack of wireless is no surprise, I haven't told Ubuntu about the wireless network/password, but there is a wired connection to my router. Both the wired and wireless connections work fine under Windows 8 (bleah). It seems like this problem needs to be solved before proceeding, unless the installed OS would have better networking support than that on the LiveCD (and it doesn't make sense to me that it would).

Any ideas? I don't know what else to try.

Larry

fantab
April 13th, 2013, 05:57 AM
Perhaps its because of the router. After booting from the LiveCD click on the 'circled' networking icon. See the screenshot below:

241277
After that, select "Edit Connections", and then "Add". Then follow the wizard after choosing "Wired"/"Ethernet" and configure your network. The following link might give you some ideas: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1981511

Even if you can't, install Ubuntu and we can help you with that later. Sometimes it may just work after installing Ubuntu. Tell the installer not to connect to internet and proceed with installation.

LarryMcMains
April 22nd, 2013, 10:46 PM
(sorry, out of town last week). I've tried adding a wired network connection, but it insists the cable is unplugged and no wireless networks are available. If I proceed with the installation, it tells me that no operating system is detected, "erase disk? - no, I don't think so! The "something else" option gives me choices of which of 5 existing partitions to modify (the largest one, I assume). However, other Ubuntu forum postings imply I might need multiple additional partitions for Ubuntu (main, one for swap space, another for boot use?) and that the safest way to re-partition was with Win 8 itself. I've in fact shrunk the main large partition as much as allowed (still > 568 GB), leaving 419 GB of free space, but how many partitions should I make, should they be assigned drive letters (or does it matter), ...? I'll bet all this is getting tedious for those of you familiar with all of this, but for me, even with many years of non-linux programming experience, it's baffling and frustrating.

fantab
April 23rd, 2013, 05:08 AM
When installing Ubuntu don't you get an option to "install alongside Windows"? Perhaps, you'll have to disable "Secure Boot". Lets see.

Download Ubuntu 13.04 (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/), check the integrity of the downloaded .iso using MD5Sum Check (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM) and check your MD5Sums from HERE (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/). 13.04 is due for release shortly, don't worry if it says beta, its quite stable.

More instructions (http://askubuntu.com/questions/221835/installing-ubuntu-on-a-pre-installed-uefi-supported-windows-8-system) on dual-booting Win8 and Ubuntu. Also read this Thread (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2137377). Tell us if you get a working internet with 13.04.

Also read everything in this forum about dual booting with Win8. If you have any more doubts ask. The forum is here to help.

Good Luck...

LarryMcMains
April 24th, 2013, 10:56 PM
I've created and verified a 13.04 LiveDVD. Good news relative to networking is that both wired and wifi connections work when booting from the 13.04 DVD. Recap, I have fast boot and secure boot turned off, and I've used the Win 8 compmgmt.msc to shrink the main Win 8 partition down to the minimum size required. When boot from the 13.04 LiveDVD and select install, the Win 8 operating system is not detected (attached first image). If I select "something else", the result is the 2nd attached image. Based on other entries in this forum, I'm guessing that I need to:

Select the free space area
Create a 24 GB (PC has 12 GB of memory) partition for swapping (use as = "Swap Area"). Primary or logical?
Create another partition from the remaining space (use as = "Ext journaling file system"). Primary or logical?
Select the "format" checkbox on the latter partition.
With the new ext4 partition selected, hit the "Install Now" button.

Is the above correct? Anything else that needs to be done first?

fantab
April 25th, 2013, 03:29 AM
Yes you are correct. Since you are using Win8 64bit you will have GPT (GUID) partition table, which means you can have all PRIMARY Partitions. (The older MBR partition table had a limitation of only FOUR Primary Partitions, in which case we use logical partitions, whereas with GPT you can have more than 100 Primary Partitions). Ubuntu 13.04 should be able to boot with 'Secure Boot' ON, though I cannot confirm as I don't have WIN8. You can try installing with 'Secure Boot' ON, if it works great, if not then disable it. Its upto you.

You will create THREE partitions from that "Free Space":
20-25GB '/' formatted ext4
2GB SWAP (If you plan to use 'Hibernate' then SWAP should be equal to or more than your RAM)
Remaining GB /home ext4 (or just plain ext4 without any mountpoint to store your data). Stick with /home for now.

Good Luck....

LarryMcMains
April 25th, 2013, 04:07 PM
Slow going .... I created the partitions as I thought they were described above (see /dev/sda6, 7, 8 in the attached image), but when I try to install, I get a pop-up saying "No root file system is defined". Though not intuitively obvious to me, it would seem that, by process of elimination, I should mark the /dev/sda7 (25 GB) partition with the "/" mount point - true?

Stalled yet again, jeez....

LarryMcMains
April 25th, 2013, 06:02 PM
I found posts from last year that recommend three partitions with a 10-20 GB ext partition and "/" mount point. So, I'm going to try marking my 25 GB partition as such. Hoping for the best...

fantab
April 25th, 2013, 06:08 PM
Yes, you have to use "/" as mountpoint. Also, you have created a 13GB SWAP, do you really need that big a SWAP?

LarryMcMains
April 25th, 2013, 07:00 PM
I found other postings from last year that recommend a 10-20 GB partition mounted at "/", so I tried marking my 25 GB partition as such and proceeding. The 13.04 installation claims to have completed successfully, but when I reboot, it goes straight to Windows 8. Since the Ubuntu LiveDVD never detected my Win 8 OS, and thus (I guess) I never got an option to "install alongside another OS", I wonder if the dual boot functions have even been installed?

Ideas, anyone?

LarryMcMains
April 26th, 2013, 01:14 AM
Regarding the size of the swap space I created: Posts in these forums recommended a couple GB plus the computer's memory size, 2+12=14 (came out 139999 for some reason). Perhaps this is ridiculously high? Given something has to be fixed to get dual boot to work, it wouldn't be hard to delete the partitions I created and start over with a smaller swap partition. My bigger problem at the moment is that, despite an install of 13.04 that claimed to be successful, the system only boots straight to Windows 8. I just reconfirmed that the boot speed is normal (vs fast) and the secure boot is disabled.

fantab
April 26th, 2013, 03:20 AM
Don't worry if you don't get an option to install 'alongside Windows' option during install. Just install it with "Something Else" option and do it manually.

You will have now fix your boot with "Boot Repair (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair)". After installing Ubuntu restart computer and boot with Ubuntu Live DVD/USB, "Try Ubuntu" and follow the instructions provided in the given link and also HERE (http://askubuntu.com/questions/221835/installing-ubuntu-on-a-pre-installed-uefi-supported-windows-8-system).

The Size of your SWAP is 'ridiculously high' if you DON'T intend to use 'Hibernate'. If you 'Hibernate' your computer then, I guess its OK. However the recommendation of 2 + RAM is very old. With 12GB of RAM is very unlikely you will ever use SWAP at all, unless you Hibernate. 2GB if you don't use hibernate is plenty. I have 4GB SWAP with 4GB RAM and my machine never uses it.

Read the instructions carefully on both the given links and proceed. You are almost there.

Good Luck.

LarryMcMains
April 27th, 2013, 03:29 AM
Bad news first (good news coming): I created ubuntu-secure-remix (aka linux-secure-remix) DVD, but when I booted from it, it immediately responsed with "Start PXE over ipv4, press esc to exit". The 2nd choice was to create a boot-repair cd, but the web page has a warning up front that says that it does not work with newer systems with UEFI, so I didn't even try this.

The good news: the last alternative was to boot the 13.04 install LiveDVD and install boot-repair on that - this worked! I ran boot-repair, selected the "recommended repair" action, rebooted, and got the boot OS selection menu!!! Both Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 8 can be started successfully! So, I have still have much work to install all the programs I had on my old system, but I believe I'm on my way. I have to quit for today, but tomorrow, I will try to post with a summary of the needed steps that I had to perform on the way to a successful install of 13.04 along side Windows 8.

Thanks very much for all of the help and sticking with me despite all of my (probably naive) questions.

fantab
April 27th, 2013, 04:47 AM
I am glad that you are successfully dual-booting Win8 and Ubuntu. :)

LarryMcMains
April 27th, 2013, 09:32 PM
Finally, here are the steps that i believe were necessary in order to install Ubuntu on a new Toshiba notebook in a dual boot arrangement with Windows 8.

Switch from 12.04 LTS to 13.04. My initial attempts as indicated by the title were to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (desiring to stay with a well tested release that would not have to be upgraded for awhile). However, the LiveCD I created had an unreadable first screen, and, getting by that by trial and error, when I did boot into 12.04 from the LiveDVD, I was unable to make any networking functions work. Switching at the suggestion of user Fantab to release 13.04 solved both of these problems.
Create some free space on the 1 TB hardddrive for ubuntu. I did this as described in http://askubuntu.com/questions/221835/installing-ubuntu-on-a-pre-installed-uefi-supported-windows-8-system using the windows 8 compmgmt.msc program to shrink the largest partition (of 5 on the harddrive) as much as the program allowed (gained about 42% of the available space).
Based warnings in the link above and from Fantab, I set the boot speed on my notebook from "fast" to "Normal" and turned off "Secure Boot". These were both in the BIOS settings, accessible on the Toshiba by hitting the F2 key rapidly and continuously while restarting the notebook.
In order to boot from the LiveDVD (DVD required, 13.04 was too large to fit on a CD), I had to select the DVD drive as the boot device. On the Toshiba, the boot menu can be accessed by rapidly and continuously hitting F12 while restarting.
On the first menu after booting from the DVD, I always in all cases chose the 1st (Try Ubuntu) option. This may not have been the most efficient way to do things, but... it's what I did.
From the Ubuntu desktop, I confirmed that networking was active and then started the Ubuntu installation with the icon on the desktop.
The install process did not recognize my Windows 8 installation at all and gave me choices of "Erase disk" and "Something else". I chose the latter!
The following screen was a listing of all the existing partitions and the 419 GB free space I created earlier. I selected the free space and hit "+" to carve out a 4GB partition with a usage of "swap". (Initially, I had a much larger space, based on recommendations in these forums, but Fantab noted above that, with the amount of memory that my system had, and unless I wanted to use the hibernate function, then I had far to much swap space allocated.) 4 GB may still be too large - I dunno.
I then allocated a 25 GB partition of type EXT4 and a mount point of "/" for Ubuntu to install into.
Finally, I allocated a partition with all of the remaining space of type EXT4 and a mount point "/home"
At this point I hit the "Install now" button and in about 15 minutes, the process indicated it had completed successfully. However, when I restarted the system, it went directly to Windows 8 without any mention of Ubuntu - not totally unexpected, based on many other postings in these forums
To fix this, I ran "Boot-repair" as described in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair. The first option for getting the Boot-repair program did not work at all for me. The Ubuntu_secure_remix LiveDVD would only display a message to "install PXE over ipv4" before quitting. The Boot-repair CD alternative has a warning on it's page that it does not work for recent computers with EFI and recommends ubuntu-secure-remix. The 2nd option of booting again from the 13.04 LiveDVD and installing Boot-repair there, however, worked without a hitch. I selected the "Recommended Repair" option and noted the resulting information as directed just in case, but upon restarting the system, the boot menu appeared with Ubuntu as the default and windows 8 as an option. Both work as expected.