Problem installing 4.0.1 on an HP laptop model 15t-da000

[bill...@gmail.com]

Folk,

I am trying to install 4.0.1 on a new HP laptop model 15t-da000. It has one 250G SSD and one 1 TB SATA drives, i7 cpu, intel graphics. I have overwritten the Windows 10 default installation with KDE neon (ubuntu based), using about 100G of the 250G SSD. I am trying to make a dual boot with 4.0.1 on the remaining 130-ish Gig of the SSD.

The installation seemed to start fine, though the default file system format of "LVM thin client" would not work, so I chose LVM. Installation chugged along until the end when I got the error "failed to install boot loader. To you want to continue? It will not be bootable..." or something to that effect. I indicated "yes" just to see what would happen, and it completed.

On reboot, neither Qubes nor KDE neon would come up, no grub menu came up, and no explicit EFI locations came up in the BIOS boot menu -- though the two disk drives were mentioned (and would not boot). So, I reinstalled KDE neon, at which point the grub menu came up and gave me both Qubes and KDE options.

Just for giggles, I chose Qubes, and the initial config screen came up. I chose the default config, and it gave me the error that the kernel file was not found and hung. KDE neon comes up fine.

I tried to do an installation again, only I chose "standard partition" instead of "LVM." It didn't seem to make a difference -- it still hung at "failed to install boot loader." I stopped it at that point because I had some work to do and didn't want to have to reinstall the ubuntu partition.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks!

billo

[awokd]

bill...@gmail.com wrote on 1/12/19 7:50 PM:

Boot Qubes from rescue mode on the USB. Rebuild Qubes' grub and
initramfs. It will be something like "sudo grub2-mkconfig -o
/mnt/sysimage/boot/grub2/grub.cfg". Then reboot and try the Qubes option
again from the grub menu.

[bill...@gmail.com]

> Boot Qubes from rescue mode on the USB. Rebuild Qubes' grub and
> initramfs. It will be something like "sudo grub2-mkconfig -o
> /mnt/sysimage/boot/grub2/grub.cfg". Then reboot and try the Qubes option
> again from the grub menu.

Thanks for the reply! I tried that, and got different behavior. This time, when I choose "Qubes" from the grub menu, I get *another* grub menu that only has Qubes as an option.

When I choose that, I get the error:

error: no such device: 6f291114-1d52-4d2d-8a6e-6970ceo2ca33
erro: disk 'lvmid/M16FyN-<lots of other letters and numbers>' not found
error: you need to load the kernel first.

I noticed a couple of other things as well. I'm beginning to believe that KDE neon uses grub, not grub2, since there is no grub2 directory in its /boot directory. I don't know if that would make a difference -- and I could be wrong. It's based on Ubuntu 18.04, and I'm not sure what that is. The forums I looked at all referred to grub instead of grub2, but that may just be short hand.

Do you think it would make a difference if I installed Qubes first and *then* KDE neon? I may do that, just to see if Qubes will install by itself...

billo

[bill...@gmail.com]

By the way, neither of those numbers match the UUID of the Qubes partition when I look at it using blkid in KDE neon...

[bill...@gmail.com]

The problem has been solved.

It turned out that Qubes is tolerant of KDE Neon, but KDE Neon is not tolerant of Qubes. My solution was to delete both installations, install Qubes first, and KDE Neon second. Now both boot fine. So, I did it again in the reverse order, and I replicated my first problem

So... the answer was to install KDE neon on top of Qubes rather than Qubes on top of KDE neon.

I have no idea why this makes a difference.