A week ago, I realized that I could not boot live disks. At first, I thought that it was the optical drive not writing the disks correctly, but when I tried two live disks that I've used many times before nothing happened with those either.
I have CD/DVD drive listed first in my BIOS' boot order and I even tried selecting the optical drive in the menu when the computer started and it still does not boot a disk. Thankfully, my somewhat old hard drives are still chugging along but I need to be able to use a live disk, in case one or both die on me.
My question is, how can I know for sure what the problem is? Is there a way to test the optical drive (Samsung Super Writemaster - which has a bad rep)? Could it be my motherboard. It was bought new 2 years ago, and there are no other issues with it. Also, I have been able to create playable DVDs on my computer with the Optical drive that work perfectly on my Bluray player, yet I cannot play the movies or open a data disk in file manager on my computer. What does that mean?
I want to know that it's worth it to buy another burner, before shelling out the money when I'm already practically broke from Christmas gift purchases. Any suggestions on how to test the optical drive would be appreciated.
Hello
My harddrive on my home server computer seems to have corrupted, likly due to some recent power outtages (using it as a home nas, game server, nothing important really)...
It was previously running windows 7 because I took the harddrive from my old computer, but now as I have to format it anyway I might as well do it right.
Since my server does not have a CD drive (that works) I am hoping for a way to intall Debian onto the harddrive from my main computer (running windows 8).
I have plugged it in, and the drive seems fully functional.
I'm not very skilled with Linux, and am completely on bare ground. My googling has not come up with an answer that I have understood yet.
TL;DR - How do i install Debian onto a secondary harddrive plugged into my computer take this drive and put it into another computer and boot from it?
I have setup a dual boot system with Fedora 21 and Arch Linux. The problem is that Fedora doesn't see my encrypted Arch installation. The installations are on separate partitions and do not share anything apart from hard disk space. I have run the following commands as root in Fedora:
Code:
grub2-install /dev/sda
Code:
os-prober
Code:
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
When I rebooted, Fedora was the only OS entry showing in the GRUB menu.
There was a suggestion from one of the members of the Arch forums that I should write the entry myself into /etc/grub.d/40_custom and then re-build the grub configuration or take the Arch entry from Arch's /boot/grub/grub.cfg and just paste it into the 40_custom in Fedora and rebuild.
How do I boot from a live Arch USB stick into the installed Arch and do as stated above? How would it work? Thanks in advance for your replies.
Hi guys,
I'm new to this forum and linux too.
I thought of installing a lightweight distro of linux and did some research on the net where I found people recommending Puppy Linux. Plus it is (theoretically speaking) possible to run it from a USB (flash) drive which I decided to try out but it seems like it's not that simple a task as a lot of people (all over the internet) say it is.
What I tried so far is this: installing it into a thumb drive using unetbootin follwing a youtube tutorial (which basically showed how to download an iso of puppy, use unetbootin to make the thumbdrive bootable and install puppy on it). It didn't work. The USB wasn't recognized as a bootable device. I know for sure it can be booted from it since I tried ubuntu from the same USB and the same Laptop (which is able to boot from USB).
I thought that something with the Flash Drive not OK so I tried to use a windows installer to install puppy like other windows programms but this didn't work either. This time Puppy was recognized because there was an option to boot either Puppy or Windows 7 but when I chose to boot from Puppy nothing happens just a screen flash, some letters in the top left corner saying something like NTSC or NTSF (I can't read it properly because it goes away too fast) then after the screen flash the whole thing again (boot from win 7 or Puppy I choose Puppy again the flash... basically a loop).
Any ideas what I'm doing wron or what the problem is?
Thank You for any replies.
I've made a couple attempts at installing these OS's on my machine and am still not getting it. I've actually been using AVLinux for about the past nine months, and it's working fairly well. And, yes, I know XP is down for the count, but for the moment it's the only MS option available to me - and I *need* to get it running for some work related web stuff...
This is all on a 32 bit AMD system btw.
What I've tried: Everything on one SATA drive. Partition one formatted to NTFS (about 20GB) for XP. Partitions 2 and 3 are Root and Home for AVLinux, Partition 4 at the end of the drive as the /swap for AVL.
All the how-to's and guides I've been able to come across point to (usually) Mint or Ubuntu's install dialog, and to select "something else" - which, by the way, is not a function of AVLinux's installation procedure. During install you can install GRUB to the MBR *or* root partition..
So, just to clarify to procedure (as I might have it now, but am very unsure) XP gets installed first (which is done at this point...) then my Linux distro *to the MBR* (?) then I need to add a stanza to GRUB telling it where XP lives? XP is not showing up on GRUB as I'm doing it, but I'm not too sure if installing Linux to the MBR (on the same physical drive as XP) actually wipes out the Windows bootloader....and if so, how chainloading would actually work...
So, any help appreciated, thanks.
Hello!
TL;DR: Deleted Linux partition from Windows. Stuck at Grub rescue prompt.
I'm sorry to trouble you guys, because I'm an idiot.
So I'm wanting to dual-boot Kalilinux and Windows 8.
I went through the steps such as creating a bootable USB, changing the
boot order and so on. I get into Kali, start Gparted and try to partition stuff.
I'm far from an expert, so I wasn't sure what to do. Long-story short, I
didn't seem to get Kali installed correctly, due to something with an EFI
drive being required. So I boot into windows and then stupidly, because it said in the guide,try to "uninstall" Kali by removing it's partition, inside Win8 haha... So I did.
Now I simply get the Grub rescue command prompt when I boot from the same
USB and I have no idea how to fix it. I've run bootrec.exe/fixmbr in Windows haha,
for what it's worth. However Grub can't find any partition it says.
In windows, I have like... 2-3 Recovery partitions. Does anyone know how to remove
them??? I've tried to clear as much as I can, besides the C drive and Auxillary D drive.
Any advice would be very appreciated.
I created a persistent USB thumb drive boot with LUKS for drive encryption (250 MB /boot and then 7.5 GB ext3 root). There's no swap partition because this is just to store some private files.
I want to make two or three copies of this thumb drive to store apart in case one gets destroyed/lost.
When I am booted from that thumb drive, can I plug in a same sized drive and just do a
Code:
dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc
command to make a copy of itself to another thumb drive without booting to another host OS? This way when I make changes to one (such as to update the OS, apps, or data), I could then just copy the entire thumb drive over to the other two while still booted in the original USB.
Or would I effectively have to shut down, boot to my normal host OS (or other), and then copy the thumb drives when not booted into them.
Hi, yesterday I decided to install Deepin in a dual boot. I later decided I no longer needed/wanted it so I deleted the partition. Apparently I had grub on that partition as well, and now my laptop only goes to grub rescue and will not boot.
I have an acer aspire v5 touch. Removing the hard drive is not an option. I have tried to access UEFI but my computer just beeps and goes to grub rescue. I have grub rescue disk on a flash drive, I used unetbootin to do that, but iI cannot get to any boot menu (f12), and when I use ls (hd0)/ I get a unknown file system error. Please help, and sorry for my grammar/formatting, I'm on mobile.
Tl;dr: Deleted partition containing grub and deepin, now can only get to grub rescue, and I keep getting an unknown file system error, please help.
Hi everyone.
Earlier I posted a reply on a thread about a problem with partitions while installing Elementary OS Freya as dual-boot, and yancek answered giving me a link with a tutorial (thank you!).
However, after I continue with the installation it stopped with an error saying that grub wasn't installed, something like that. But when I start my computer (with USB boot priority), pops a window with the option to 'Try Elementary..." and "Install Elementary..." and if I press Esc a grub console appears. Doesn't that mean grub is installed? What should I do to fix this?
Best regards,
a Linux amateur
I keep my Music on a USB flash drive. I do not have room on my laptop to store my mp3 library so this is not an option. Whenever, I remove the flash drive (or restart my computer, i think) my music player (rhythmbox currently) forgets where the music is stored. I have to go through reimporting my whole music library which is time consuming and tedious. I imagine that my music player can't find the files because the flash drive gets mapped to a different mount point or something after restarting or removing the drive.
TL;DR
How can I setup my laptop so that my music player can find my music library on a usb flash drive without needing to constantly re-import my library?
Also, I have the same question to syncing to cloud storage. How can I automatically sync flash storage to the cloud?