Borked brand new laptop

[claydoh]

Any one will do as long as its over 2gb. Most are at least 4 these days

Usb3 is preferred as it will be faster but Usb2 will do just fine.

You don't have to do a thing to the drive. It will already be formatted as fat32, or exfat if it is over 32gb IIRC

If it is a big drive you will need to install exfat-utils in order to read and write files to it when using it as a thumb drive but it should not matter when making the bootable drive.


Plug in the drive and fire up the USB creator tool, or download Etcher and run that.

In either case all you do is select the ISO file and the USB drive and then hit Go or Write disk or whatever the button says. Wait a bit and its done

Plug the bootable drive in the new laptop and start or reboot it. You should be able to access a one-time boot device menu via an F-key. It looks like it will be f7 for System76 laptops. Hold down that immediately when powering on to get to it.

https://support.system76.com/articles/boot-menu/

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[claydoh]

And if you get a large USB stick you'll soon discover you can create a multi ISO disk and have all sorts of fun [emoji3]

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

This one may be a bit tiny in size but are inexpensive. I have a few of these.
Any of the ones shown in the comparison section will be of good quality, reliable, and decent speeds.

Sent from my LM-V600 using Tapatalk

[jglen490]

On another laptop, I downloaded the raw CD image from Kubuntu, saving it in the root directory of the external drive.

What can I do from a GRUB prompt to get back in business? Its list of commands, displayed by pressing [tab], is very short.

So you didn't burn the iso to the external drive, and that's why it's not being recognized as a bootable device or anything else.

[jlittle]

What can I do from a GRUB prompt to get back in business? Its list of commands, displayed by pressing [tab], is very short.

Grub hasn't found it's boot/grub directory, where it loads most of itself (in the form of .mod files, most likely in the x86_64-efi directory for a UEFI boot).

I'm not sure the following is relevant to you, or you'd want to try this, but it might help someone to actually answer your question

To boot, you would have to find a boot/grub directory somewhere, addressed using grub's (device,partition)/path syntax, for example on my kubuntu it was "(hd0,gpt2)/boot/grub", before I moved it to "(hd0,gpt2)/@grub/boot/grub". At that minimal grub prompt, not much works but "ls" usually does. A simple "ls" should show the valid device,partition pairs, then you can try "ls (hd0,gpt1)/", "ls (hd0,gpt2)/", and so on, till you find a "boot". Say you find it on "(hd0,gpt2)/", then you'd try "ls (hd0,gpt2)/boot" to see if a grub directory is there. If you find a boot/grub, in my case on "(hd0,gpt2)@grub/boot/grub" you'd then run

set root=(hd0,gpt2)
set prefix=($root)/@grub/boot/grub

Then grub would have access to a lot more stuff, and no longer be crippled. "help" produces several screens of commands. There should be a grub.cfg there, and "configfile $prefix/grub.cfg" would run it. If that grub.cfg doesn't start Linux successfully, you could try pressing "e" on a menu entry to see what it's doing, and try and fix it up. I can't remember ever succeeding with that; the commands are bloated and not human-friendly. But if there's a bootable Linux install somewhere, grub can now boot it, possibly after insmod commands for the file system type, like insmod ext2 (for ext4) or insmod btrfs, with something like, for a *buntu on hd1,gpt4:

set root=(hd0,gpt4)
linux /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sdb4 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img

If there's no bootable Linux intact, but a full grub is running, you could do an iso boot from the iso on the USB external drive.

That's what I would do, because writing isos to USB sticks is slow and error-prone. For Kubuntu in
/downloads/kubuntu-20.10-desktop-amd64.iso, on a partition grub calls (hd1,msdos1):

set root=hd1,msdos1
set isofile=/downloads/kubuntu-20.10-desktop-amd64.iso
loopback loop ($root)$isofile
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=$isofile noprompt noeject
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd
boot

Note that's all from memory, I haven't tested anything.

[mbohets]

On another laptop, I downloaded the raw CD image from Kubuntu, saving it in the root directory of the external drive.

What can I do from a GRUB prompt to get back in business? Its list of commands, displayed by pressing [tab], is very short.

Just saving the iso image on the drive won't work.
An iso file is a bit like a zip file, it is a compressed container that contains the OS, and definitions on how a drive or usb stick should be partitioned and formatted,
but in order to boot from the os inside of the iso file, the iso file needs to be "installed" or "uncompressed", using a tool like dd or etcher, or similar.

That is the reason why you cannot boot from the disk onto which you just copied the iso file.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Yeah, you're right about that not working. But since I had *no* other options, I gave it a whirl. Burning a DVD wouldn't work, since the new laptop doesn't have a drive, and I didn't have any thumb drives.

A couple of updates: 1) my dying System76 laptop loses its Wi-Fi functionality immediately now, and, 2) I ordered a USB stick on Saturday, for next-day delivery.

For #1, I rummaged through a tangled web of old cables, and found a 50' Ethernet cable in good condition, which I plugged in to the one open port on my router. With it, my dying laptop and its external drives, are accessible reliably again from my phone.

#2...nothing showed up Sunday. Or today. Its status on Amazon changed to reflect it being delayed; it may arrive tomorrow...or not. I spoke to a very nice CSR [who gave me an unexpected credit for the inconvenience], and all she could see is that it's somewhere on its journey, hopefully to me!

[jglen490]

Yeah, you're right about that not working. But since I had *no* other options, I gave it a whirl. Burning a DVD wouldn't work, since the new laptop doesn't have a drive, and I didn't have any thumb drives.

...

But a USB drive is a USB drive is a USB drive. If you can burn to a USB thumb drive, you can burn to a USB hard drive. It's certainly worth a try. Even use dd to do a bit-wise write to the USB drive.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Dup...

[DoYouKubuntu]

But a USB drive is a USB drive is a USB drive. If you can burn to a USB thumb drive, you can burn to a USB hard drive. It's certainly worth a try. Even use dd to do a bit-wise write to the USB drive.

I don't want to do anything that will further screw up how things are going, so I'll pass! Those external USB drives are where I back everything up; I wouldn't want to risk losing their data.

Besides, this [my entire life right now] has reminded me of certain virtues, like patience and accepting things we can't change. So it's actually been a blessing in disguise. When the drive arrives, great! Until then, I'm good. Just having reliable access to all my data [via my phone] has been wonderful, and reduced the anxiety I was feeling.

Plus, I paid my property tax the other day...a painful, but necessary, part of life. With that out of the way, I feel several tons lighter!

[jglen490]

It's just an option.

[DoYouKubuntu]

It's just an option.

Absolutely! It's just that the way things are going right now, I'd probably end up losing all my data. It's unreal the bad luck I've had lately! And it's left me chuckling rather than pulling out my hair. It's like, REALLY? THAT'S BREAKING, TOO?! So it's either laugh or cry. I'm choosing laugh.

[GreyGeek]

What? You have hair that you can pull out

[DoYouKubuntu]

Yippee! I'm typing this on my beautiful new System76 Gazelle, running Kubuntu 20.04LTS.

I have much customization to do [I can BARELY read this], but wanted to post a follow-up that it's all good now. Thanks everyone for your help and input.

[DoYouKubuntu]

What? You have hair that you can pull out

Yep, sure do! Right now, anyway.

I've lost a lot of it at various times, including pregnancy, brain surgery, and being on steroids. Luckily, most of it is back now!

I've teased my husband...um...quite a bit over the decades. He was 23 when we met--and his receding hairline had already done a lot of receding. He ended up just losing the hair on top of his head, so he still has hair all around. But he keeps it very short now, plus it's very fine and, well, pretty dotted with gray! It's hard to tell his blond and gray hair apart, though, unless you're really looking up close.

When my hair was down to my knees, we used to play around with it, placing some on his head, pretending like he had hair again. Damn, that was a million years ago...

UPDATE on new laptop: it's great! I'm taking my time making it 'mine,' because I'm mulling over changing some of my usual things. Also, I'm eliminating a ton of files I just don't need any more on my primary computer. Slowly but surely, it'll get there.

KDE Connect was up and connected to my Android phone in no time. The laptop sees and accesses all of my networked computers...but I haven't gotten [yet] where the reverse is true. Tomorrow...

[MoonRise]

Just to note to some here, I noted the UEFI menu was similar to my new KFOCUS M1 I got a while back. One thing I noted when trying to make a Gparted boot device, I could not simply dd the ISO. The image it created on the drive was not "viewable" by that UEFI system. At least here anyways.

What I finally found by Google means was I had to get a thumb drive that I could format as FAT32 and then copy the mounted ISO image files over. Once I did that, it was recognized by that UEFI system as bootable.

I did that as I didn't like how KFocus has the main boot drive formatted for what I intended to do. So... anyway, just FYI from here to maybe help others.