this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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I installed it from the Calamaries Installer found in the LIVE USB ISO this time. And Instead of my primary hdd, I installed it on the other one. Works now, thanks for all of your support, dear nerds.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Looks like the installer and grub is confused about the hard drive order different in instaler and different while booting, both those drives could also have the same partition/drive ID making it confused, that could happen if you cloned/copied the drive in the past

I would say as a easy and safe solution

  1. unplug all other drives that you don't want install linux
  2. Install Linux (best by formatting whole drive) - it should work just fine at this point
  3. After confirming everything works - connect the other drives back
  4. If Linux no longer boots after adding drives then tweak disk boot order in BIOS
[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Look for a key in your keyboard labelled as "any" and press it. Setup should run fine afterwards.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

This error (hd0) is typical of legacy (BIOS) booting end happens solely because of the MBR. GRUB2 is hit or miss with MBR.

If you're not planning on dual booting with Windows XP/Vista/7, I'd recommend going to your motherboard settings and changing the boot mode to UEFI.

Then reinstall Debian. That will automatically sort things out :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I thought the only reason to still use GRUB2 was its MBR support.

We really should be moving on at this point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Time to rehearse our new well-actually hymn: "What people commonly call Linux is actually GNU/Systemd/Linux..."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

I strongly suspect that it's the motherboard's boot mode as well. The Debian installer will use an MBR partition table if your system uses BIOS boot.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago

It's a configuration error in Grub.

This has guidance on how to fix Grub; the 3rd answer on the page is the most comprehensive on how to fix this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/397485/what-to-do-when-i-get-an-attempt-to-read-or-write-outside-of-disk-hd0-error?noredirect=1&lq=1

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Is this a desktop computer ? Two hard disks can make things more difficult. How about taking the power cord temporarily off from the larger disk, then install, and if it's successful then turn it off and give the 2nd disk power again, and add that 2nd disk manually to the fstab as e.g. /opt/ as mount point.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's been a long time since I last installed Linux on a two hard-drive system, so take this advice as "likely not necessary, but will probably fix your issue"

The installer asks whether or not you want to "replace" the existing OS or install alongside. And if you're fairly new to linux (like I was at the time) it can be tricky to see at a glance which hard-drive you want to install it to and which you don't.

So to be doubly cautious and make sure that didn't happen, I simply unplugged my secondary harddrive during the install so that the installer would automatically be reading the correct one. Then all I had to do was choose "replace" or "install alongside" without worrying about anything else.

The drawback to that was, once the install was complete and I re-attached my second drive, I had to configure it to auto-mount and do some work on that, but at least my computer was working.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I do that too! And fwiw haven't had to manually configure auto-mount for other drives in a while.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Is this after installing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I'd say grub is having trouble with your hardware (mainboard or disk maybe).

You could try to update your mainboard's firmware, or install another bootloader (or maybe just a newer version of grub). I'm not sure what the easiest way to get a different bootloader is. I don't think Debian's installer offers anything besides grub. Maybe other people can point to a distro where installing something other than grub is easy.

Because switching out the bootloader on an unbootable system (i.e. not from the installer) is going to be whole pain in the butt involving booting into a live usb, mounting and chrooting and god knows what.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Hi, it would be useful to know what kind of device you are installing on. For a laptop the model and make would be especially useful. If it is a PC then the drive configuration would be interesting (what kind of drive, how many etc.)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It's a PC. Two Hard Disk Drives

1st Drive: SATA:PM-KINGSTON S

2nd Drive: SATA:SM-ST500LT012

edit: 1st one is of around 138GB, 2nd one has around 500GB

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ok, that looks like a fairly standard setup. I guess taking a look at the boot loader itself would be the next step. When you see the Debian bootloader you could try pressing 'e' to view what commands it uses internally to boot. The lines starting with "linux" and "initrd" would be most interesting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So it still uses a MSDOS partition table, interesting. This usually only happens on systems that do not support EFI at all.

Is your BIOS and main board fairly old per chance?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, around 14 years old lmao

[–] [email protected] 52 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

I dont know how you flashed the usb, but it seems like the installer is damaged. Try redownloading the iso, check the file hash, flash the usb drive with balena etcher and reinstall.

Did you change the partition layout in the installer?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

This sounds correct.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Okay, I will try again with a live-boot USB this time

edit: Thanks so much! This finally worked

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Could you describe what has transpired before? Have you actually installed Debian? Are you still trying to boot into the install medium?

Perhaps sharing device specs might be helpful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This is after installing debian and booting it up. I used the "complete package" Iso they offer.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Together with all the other information you've shared, it's not entirely clear why it has failed; at least to me.

If you're not married/tied to the installation of Debian, may I suggest installing Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Tuxedo OS or Zorin OS instead?

There are of course many other distros you could choose, but the earlier mentioned ones are 'stable' like Debian is. I thought that perhaps it was what attracted you towards Debian in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, I couldn't find a good solution online either. Maybe It was a bit flip? Guess the universe sent a high velocity particle at my PC from lightyears away just to ruin my day, that's the only explaination I have after seven hours of looking online.

Sure, I'll check out some other distros.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I setup popos and EndeavourOS recently, very easy to install. Learning them was about equal IMO, they have different ways of doing things. I liked PopOS initially because its supported by a company that has financial incentive to make sure it runs reliably.

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