Ubuntu studio 24.10. newby

[planemad]

Thanks for the reply. Yes. I watched a YouTube vid about the 2 USB drives. I think it was one of the first things I tried a week or so ago. Thanks for the reminder. I'll revisit that process and see if I have more luck. I bought a new 128gb USB drive to try that. Is there any prep I should be aware of for that drive? Thanx��

[planemad]

Thanks for the replies. I'm definately going for separate install to external USB drive or ssd. I don't want to risk interfere with the internal or windows. My surface pro has an internal SSD. An external SSD has comparable specs, plus I can try it on my old Dell XPS. It's a test process really, performance etc. Thanks

[tea for one]

I'm definately going for separate install to external USB drive or ssd. I don't want to risk interfere with the internal or windows.

Are you completely familiar with the task?
One USB disk containing the Ubuntu installer and a target destination disk, where the installed system will eventually reside.
If so, boot the installer, open a terminal and enter:-

sudo parted -l

Please post the command and output in code tags.
This will show if your target disk is accessible.

[TheFu]

Generally, there's only one UEFI partition for a system and it would be shared by all OSes that can be booted. I suppose there's an EFI boot manager screen on some systems to allow selecting which OS to be booted. I know nothing about those.

I've seen recommendations that the drive you don't want touched to be disconnected during an install to ensure it isn't touched. Can you do that?

[planemad]

Thanks for the reply. I remember, and I tried that. I've tried again. The 2nd USB drive doesn't show up as an option in install, just the main internal drive. I've tried 2nd drive mounted, unmounted. It's 128gb formatted to fat 32

[planemad]

sudo parted -"l"
i dont think ive ever seen that symbol on the end

[davetheoldcoder]

sudo parted -"l"

That should be:

sudo parted -l

or:

sudo parted --list

[oldfred]

While the installer uses FAT32 for boot, an install must be a Linux partition, default is ext4.

But if installing to an external flash drive or SSD, best to use gpt partitioning & have ESP - efi system partition and the LInux partition on external drive. Default typically is to to install boot loader (grub) to first drive or internal drive. That is why we often suggest disconnecting all other drives. Some UEFI allow turning off/disabling a drive in UEFI settings.

If you have ESP on external drive, then you can boot it just like you boot live installer on any system using a drive entry by label/brand or drive. If always using with one system then you typically have an "ubuntu" entry.

My external M.2 SSD, internal NVMe drive is now just Windows. I do use a data partition and keep / (root) a bit smaller, but new users probably should just have /, unless drive is very large.

fred@m2-noble:~$ lsblkt 
MODEL                         NAME        FSTYPE   SIZE FSUSED LABEL       PARTLABEL                    MOUNTPOIN UUID 
Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 250GB sda                232.9G                                                            
                              ├─sda1      vfat     510M  10.4M             EFI System Partition         /boot/efi A02D-F0F6 
                              ├─sda2      vfat     5.9G        m2_fat      m2_fat                                 4738-7B8C 
                              ├─sda3      ext4    35.2G   9.7G m2-noble    m2_noble                     /         09a68bbd-3d26-4630-b18e-7c687761aa36 
                              └─sda5      ext4   127.4G  22.6G m2_data     m2_data                      /mnt/data 0c374965-53c6-437c-a2ad-f0508486f9d5

[tea for one]

Thanks for the reply. I remember, and I tried that. I've tried again. The 2nd USB drive doesn't show up as an option in install, just the main internal drive. I've tried 2nd drive mounted, unmounted. It's 128gb formatted to fat 32

Power off
Attach both external disks (installer disk and target disk)
Access your UEFI settings via your PC dedicated key
Does the PC recognise both the external USB devices?

My surface pro has an internal SSD. An external SSD has comparable specs, plus I can try it on my old Dell XPS.

Any joy with your Dell XPS?

[planemad]

Thank you for the replies. I'll put more time into it shortly. I've got gparted iso and zip. I'm not too sure how to install it tho. I've tried sudo apt-get install gparted. Sum errors come up at the bottom of the code. But anyway awesome helpful suggestions. Thanks!