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    Installation of 18.04 on HP Pavillion laptop

    I have an HP laptop that is (was) a great machine until the HD interface quit working. I bought a new machine and thought I'd try to install Kubuntu on the old one via a thumb drive. Probably would be slow but would give me a chance to play with Ubuntu (I'm a complete Unix newbie).
    I've done a good bit of poking around and have several questions I can't find answers to. I am not able to get the installation to compete
    1. Can I expect an install to run on a machine
      (running from a thumb drive)
      with no HD? I can boot the install and have gotten quite a ways along but it always fails (more on that to follow).
    2. I used balenaEtcher to create a bootable drive on Windows on my good laptop and can boot from that just fine on the target laptop. I am using a second 32GB USB-3 thumb drive as the install target.
    3. Started Kubuntu and chose to Install.
    4. It found that I had an available wireless connection. It showed my home SSID (WPA-2-Personal). I entered the Wi-Fi password but it reported the connection failed. Moved to using a direct ethernet connection.
    5. When I got to the questions about disk setup, I tried various choices. The manual option I found completely befuddling, but the automatic choice to use the entire drive seemed to be useful.

      It claimed it would make 3 partitions. The install proceeded quite a ways to the point past where it had downloaded updates from the internet and was doing some sort of user setup. There the install crashed.
    6. When I looked at the target drive with Windows diskpart it showed an EFI boot partition (about 1/2G) with the rest (30G) of the thumb drive as one partition that, of course, was unreadable to Windows.
    7. I never was asked about a Home partition. Do I need to have that right away? I was thinking I would make the Home partition later on an SD card using FAT.
    8. After the install crashes, if I tap the power button, I get a huge list of errors that seems to scroll on forever. If flashes by too quickly to read. Is this useful? How can I capture it or stop the scrolling?

    I have a hunch that the problems somehow relate to partitioning the target thumb drive, but that's all Greek to me in Ubuntu.

    Rather a lot of questions. Sorry about that but I've spent hours with slow progress so far and am now stuck. HELP

    Al

    #2
    Having a broken HD interface is not nice, some (older) computers will refuse to boot when there is no primary HD.
    But when you are able to boot into a live desktop from a USB device I would imagine you should also be able to install on a USB device and run it.

    I have working installs on both regular USB flash drives and an external SSD card, with grub installed on the same they boot up nicely and the speed is even on
    USB2 acceptable.

    My first suggestion would be to NOT use the option to download updates etc. during installation, keep it simple.

    On a USB drive you should be able to select the DOS type partitioning instead of EFI but it does depend on what the BIOS (UEFI) accepts, see if it works better.

    The whole disk option is OK, especially on a relatively small 32GB drive,
    Manual partitioning is best done before installing, so from the live desktop using the KDE partition manager.
    You need some 12-15GB for root and the rest can be /home, providing you have ample RAM (+8GB) you don't necessarily need a swap partition.

    Most people will use ext4 as file system but especially on very small drives btrfs is a very good option because it will not waste empty space on partitions.

    A separate /home is not strictly necessary but is handy in case of an upgrade, it is possible to later add other partitions to the existing /home.

    The wireless connection (driver) might sort itself once you have updated the software, i.e. after installation.

    Does your laptop have a working optical drive? If so you might want consider replacing it with an HD in a caddy.

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