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nobody 1y ago

I’m installing Ubuntu 24.10 on an external hard drive and when I go to make my 100MB FAT32 partition for the bootloader to reside on, FAT32 isn’t one of the options that is selectable. Just Ext 2,3,4 among others. I’m trying to make a truly portable install but after several attempts I’m considering just flashing the drive with the iso and having a workable but not fully standalone installation. The guides online are just different enough from what I’m seeing during the installation process that I’m burning hours I don’t have on this. Can anyone provide any guidance? I’ve already nearly rendered the external drive I bought useless through various means of manipulating the partitions, and have spent much of the time reformatting that drive and getting it to be detectable by Windows again. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks.

#ubuntu #linux

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Ľḭṿḙśƫṟãɖãṁṹṧ💫#RunCoreV30 1y ago

100MB is too small. I normally keep it around 512 to 600MB. Make sure it’s set as ef00 when using partitioner and before actually formatting to fat32

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nobody 1y ago

I’m just going by the most current guide I’ve got. 100MB for Boot, 16GB for swap, then whatever you want for /home. I may just end up going the easy route and installing it on an internal drive just so I can get up and running

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cloud fodder 1y ago

ubuntu installer is not very flexible.. check the archlinux wiki partitioning guide for more info about the many possibilities for booting and partitioning..

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Ľḭṿḙśƫṟãɖãṁṹṧ💫#RunCoreV30 1y ago

Any reason you aren’t using the auto partitioning?

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nobody 1y ago

I tried and it won’t let me set the tags and it’s not showing the main partition as a clickable option as unallocated space or letting me create new partitions like gparted will. Everything worked the first time with gparted minus letting me format the boot loader partition as FAT32 as directed

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Ľḭṿḙśƫṟãɖãṁṹṧ💫#RunCoreV30 1y ago

When I have problem with the disks and partitions I would clear the partition table and reboot , then try this again if partitioning and installation has been tried before.

dd the header of the table and then wipefs .

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saeed 1y ago

A simple solution: use Ubuntu's automatic format option, it will format the entire external hard drive and create the necessary drives (warning: all files on the hard drive will be deleted) after installing Ubuntu, remove the hard drive from it and restart the computer with live Ubuntu flash memory (you should have a separate flash memory on which the Ubuntu iso file has been flashed) after restarting the computer and running connect the Ubuntu external hard drive to the computer and run the gparted program, this program is used to format drives and create new drives. Shrink the drive on which Ubuntu is installed with gparted and create as many ntfs drives as you need in the freed space. In this way, you have an external hard drive on which Ubuntu is installed, but not all of its space is occupied by Ubuntu, and you can use it to save files in Windows.

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nobody 1y ago

24.10 just keeps erroring out. I wiped an internal drive a could do without to see if the install would proceed normally. Now downloading an older version 24.04. All I really want to do for now is learn the OS and some command line stuff. It’s been a real time sink so far. Ideally I’d like to just get off Windows entirely and just get a dedicated Linux laptop that’s largely offline for running Sparrow and as a terminal for talking to my start9. It’s been painful so far

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saeed 1y ago

The first steps are always the hardest, then everything gets easier. Good luck!

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nobody 1y ago

Thanks for your input. I finally have a working copy of Ubuntu on a separate external drive so I can get my feet wet on Linux command line stuff and test a bunch of stuff. Before it was all done I had a couple of heart stopping hours when the installer partitioned and overwrote a part of my primary backup drive to use as the bootloader. It also rendered that drive unrecognizable by Windows till I fixed that. Fortunately I had already backed up all of my super critical stuff before I started, and recently burned 20 years of photos onto DVD’s, so everything I lost was just fluff. So I effectively chopped my critical files down to what I really need. From 200GB of crap down to 4.5GB that can go on thumb drives.

Then, I imaged EVERYTHING and made a recovery stick so I can wipe everything and do a total rebuild of the whole system in about an hour of recovery time. But not before I had to run a full chkdsk on my main OS drive. Literally every skill I’ve ever learned about disk management, DOS commands and redundant data storage came into play over what should have been a simple OS install. And I only lost about 20 hours of sleep over 3 days. Looking forward to getting a dedicated Linux laptop so I don’t have to dual boot.

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nobody 1y ago

And the beautiful part is, all of my BTC stuff and my connection to my node and my Electrum server was unaffected because it’s totally segregated.

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saeed 1y ago

It was a good effort bro👍

In general, to learn Linux, you must love manipulating the OS and exploring its different parts. Linux is a paradise for geeks.