gray-marsh
October 12th, 2016, 06:33 PM
New to the forums and quite new to Ubuntu and got myself into a bit of a pickle!
Have a Compaq Mini (wireless only, no cd drive) that was configured to dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu and was working okay. Then for various reasons I decided the remove Ubuntu and stupidly deleted the Ubuntu partition from Windows and so as I'm sure you know the pc will now not boot and ends with a Grub-Rescue prompt.
After a lot of research I realised the only option would be to create a Live Ubuntu USB stick and boot from there.
Next issue is I am currently on holiday on a Scottish island with very slow broadband and the only other internet accessible device I have is the iPad I am currently writing this on. I briefly managed to borrow a friends laptop but could not wait the 5hrs it was going to take to download a full Ubuntu 16.04 ISO file so had a search and managed to find a stripped out version which was only 295mb and so downloaded this and created the USB.
Back on the notebook it happily boots from the USB and brings up the Grub? menu asking me to install Ubuntu or try it without installation but whichever one I choose causes the installation to crash out with a missing firmware which I think is for the wireless device.
The problem is I have no way of downloading the firmware and writing it to the USB stick so is there any way I can force the install past this point and ignore the error? If I press enter when the error comes up then I get to an Ubuntu command prompt and if I type Help then I get a list of commands but I am unsure of Linux syntax so any tips on what I can do?
thanks
Graham
Have a Compaq Mini (wireless only, no cd drive) that was configured to dual boot Windows XP and Ubuntu and was working okay. Then for various reasons I decided the remove Ubuntu and stupidly deleted the Ubuntu partition from Windows and so as I'm sure you know the pc will now not boot and ends with a Grub-Rescue prompt.
After a lot of research I realised the only option would be to create a Live Ubuntu USB stick and boot from there.
Next issue is I am currently on holiday on a Scottish island with very slow broadband and the only other internet accessible device I have is the iPad I am currently writing this on. I briefly managed to borrow a friends laptop but could not wait the 5hrs it was going to take to download a full Ubuntu 16.04 ISO file so had a search and managed to find a stripped out version which was only 295mb and so downloaded this and created the USB.
Back on the notebook it happily boots from the USB and brings up the Grub? menu asking me to install Ubuntu or try it without installation but whichever one I choose causes the installation to crash out with a missing firmware which I think is for the wireless device.
The problem is I have no way of downloading the firmware and writing it to the USB stick so is there any way I can force the install past this point and ignore the error? If I press enter when the error comes up then I get to an Ubuntu command prompt and if I type Help then I get a list of commands but I am unsure of Linux syntax so any tips on what I can do?
thanks
Graham