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15124
March 26th, 2015 14:00
M3800 -- Install Ubuntu to mini card?
Hello,
I ordered a Dell M3800 (back in January) for a user and at the time was able to configure my quote with Ubuntu and the mini SSD + 2nd hard drive option.
The machine arrived today running Windows. No biggie, I'll just install Ubuntu over top... and theoretically add repros later...
After Ubuntu 14.04 goes through the install process, the machine fails to boot. Is there a way to make this work?
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rberger-mist
1 Message
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May 4th, 2015 14:00
Ever get this to work. I want to do the same thing.
jrronimo
9 Posts
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May 4th, 2015 17:00
Hi rberger-mist: Yes I did! Here are the main steps I ran through; I worked on the machine a lot, so I'm not sure what the magic bullet was.
1. Boot into a Windows installation (yes, yes, I know) and run the latest BIOS update.
2. During the Ubuntu 14.04 installation process (I was using a flash drive), Ubuntu did not create the correct partitions.
3. Assuming you're willing to start with a completely empty drive, use the Ubuntu partition manager during install to make the following partitions:
/boot -- 200 MB at the beginning of the drive
/swap -- Same number of MB as your RAM (16384 in my instance) at the end of the drive
/root (or maybe just '/') -- EXT4 format, all empty space in the middle.
Once I did that, the machine booted up and worked just fine. You might have to fiddle with some of the hard drive related settings in the BIOS, but I cannot recall what I ended up with -- my user has the machine at the moment.
I hope this helps!
rbergerMist
1 Message
0
May 4th, 2015 21:00
I'm trying to move from the Dell ubuntu (no windows) on the M3800 hard drive to the mini-card SSD drive. I thought I could just take the recovery image and install it onto the SSD drive. But as you said, it doesn't create the partitions correctly (they all ended up being VFAT including /).
I then tried to do a fresh install from the standard Canonical distro and update the grub.cfg and the apt sources as mentioned elsewhere on this forum. But just ended up with the bios boot all screwed up. Can't seem to get it back to default even after running the recovery image. (Got the HDD back to factory but the bios boot has all sorts of problems with multiple ubuntu and windows boot entries there no matter how many times I try to delete it with the bios.
Pretty frustrated that there isn't an easy way to reset to factory for this setup.