Comments on: Portable Ubuntu Problems

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:05:02 +0000

Black screen. Blinking cursor at top left. Eventually a couple of new lines. Then it jumps to the windows bootloader and boots windows normally.

By: Martin Atkins

Martin Atkins — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:51:19 +0000

When you say "it doesn't work", what exactly is happening? Is grub giving some sort of error?

By: Jim Reverend

Jim Reverend — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:05:02 +0000

Black screen. Blinking cursor at top left. Eventually a couple of new lines. Then it jumps to the windows bootloader and boots windows normally.

By: Martin Atkins

Martin Atkins — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:51:19 +0000

When you say "it doesn't work", what exactly is happening? Is grub giving some sort of error?

By: Jim Reverend

Jim Reverend — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:18:02 +0000

The ultimate goal, actually, is, like the common FlashDrive Linux's
goal, is to have a Portable Ubuntu installation that will operate on
almost any machine with a moden BIOS that I care to attach it to. My
understanding was that, like the LiveCD, it would "just work". It
doesn't. At all.

If my intent is only to get it to run on MY laptop, and no where else,
then I'll just install Grub on to the MBR of the internal drive, and let
it boot Windows or Linux and be done with it.

By: farrisgoldstein

farrisgoldstein — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:06:54 +0000

Your scientific method is flawed anyway, since the ultimate goal is to boot this on your laptop, which has a different bios, different chipsets, different diseases and different sexual orientations.

If you really want to LEARN what it's doing/when... Hey, it's F/OSS, and I'm pretty sure all the install scripts that do the grubbing and whatnot are easy to find.

By: Jim Reverend

Jim Reverend — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:51:01 +0000

I'm using a Dell laptop... yes. However, I'm using my Desktop system to
attempt the initial install on this USB Drive.

From what I've seen in the partition my options are only 3: 1) use an
entire disk and I get to pick which one, 2) find me the biggest hunk of
free space possible and use all of it, 3) let me do it manually. I could
let it take the entire drive, but then I have to deal with gparted, and
shrinking and all that later. And, in truth, it shouldn't matter. To be
absolutely certain, I even let it do the partitioning, looked at what it
built, and then redid it manually in a similar fashion.

I'm pretty sure something is "wrong". The problem with yanking the
internal drive and going for it is that I'll never know what it did
differently and, therefore, I'll never know what was required to get it
right the first time. I don't mind letting the system do it, if I learn
from the process. If it doesn't work it's even worse because, not only
did I waste time and still not have a working system, but, I also don't
get to know what things it tried.

Ubuntu can't be the culprit because it's not even getting there. The
hard drive indicates that it should work and my BIOS appears to support
this fully. Additionally, I had the same problem trying to boot from a
Flash Drive. I've tried booting the drive on other machines just to be
sure it isn't my BIOS. They won't boot it either. Therefore, I'm 95%
certain that the issue is either Grub/Boot Loader/MBR related or that
what I'm doing is not possible.

Most of the tutorials I've seen on doing this use a FlashDrive instead
of a full USB drive and they use syslinux and a FAT partition instead of
ext3.

By: farrisgoldstein

farrisgoldstein — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:38:39 +0000

Bastard! You told me last week you were using a Dell. What is it then? No matter what it is, it's probably easy to remove. And, given the nature of my job, whatever model it is, I've probably stripped it down.

If you follow these steps, which will take only a minute or two more than an Ubuntu install, you will end up with either a working system or proof that something is "wrong." Throw out your "This should work, so I won't use a logical algorithm to figure out why it won't" pride for just long enough to get it done. I paint myself into this corner all the time and it's very liberating to just give into the process:

1) Take out the internal drive.
2) Install Ubuntu, as plain-jane as possible, and let the installer handle grub. If you MUST muck with the partitioning, JUST shrink the size of the "/" filesystem it wants to make, then rearrange when you're through. This is, in my opinion, faster and cleaner anyway.
3) Replace the internal drive, and make sure your BIOS is set to boot in "CDROM->USB->INTERNALHDD" order.

If, after that, Ubuntu does not boot when the USB drive is plugged in, then it's almost certainly true that something is wrong, and no amount of manual grubbery will help you until you rule out which hardware/firmware/software is the culprit.

By: Jim Reverend

Jim Reverend — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:09:02 +0000

I don't have a Dell, so it'll take a bit longer to pull the drive out.
Worse comes to worse, that's certainly an option. However, Ubuntu
shouldn't be doing any grub-ery or fdisk-ery that I can't do manually...
I just need to know what steps I'm missing. If I can't find a way to to
this manually I might give it a shot, but, I'd be quite upset if I went
through the trouble to pull it out and then have it still not boot off
the internal drive once I plug the internal drive back in. :)

By: farrisgoldstein

farrisgoldstein — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 15:57:42 +0000

As much as I love Ubuntu, everytime I've tried to do manual partitioning I ended up with a mess to clean up. So I usually let it do it's thing, leaving unused space on the drive so I can change my file system layout later.

That said, I think you might get quick results, or at least gain more information, if you run through the install again and just let it do what it wants with partitions (except maybe shrink it's / partition) and grub. This is, of course, counter-productive since by default it might install grub to your internal drive.

You can get around all of it if you just take your internal drive out before you do the install. Sounds crazy, but it only takes 15 seconds on a Dell.