sorry, double post.

@rokytnji: yes, it is a UEFI machine, but in BIOS I set the Boot to Legacy. When it came to installing antiX I choose the Legacy route from the Boot menu.
On the Linux Mint forum I was told explicitly not make a separate boot partition - this was for another installation.

Yes, that's true, it did that, but I saw it and used the drop-down and selected the eMMC drive.

I read the comments in that thread, and this is what gets me with antiX: the acrobatics one needs to go through to get the thing installed and set up properly. To use the car analogy: you need to be a mechanic to drive the car. Why can't there be a proper, bugless auto install? From this point of view MX isn't any better than antiX, judging from your experience.

Last year I installed both antiX and MX in a VM without any problems. Installing it on bare metal is a different kettle of fish, obviously.

Only on your hardware, unfortunately. The vast majority of users do not have issues installing antiX.

Great, so what is your suggestion? How can I resolve my unique problem?

The grub boot-loader and with gpt type disk needs a 2mb cleared/unformatted partition flagged as bios-grub when booting in legacy mode.

to try and fix without reinstalling, boot the live usb, use gparted to create the 2mb bios-grub partition, then This is assuming /dev/sda is your internal hard drive

Some bios will not allow booting an internal gpt disk in legacy mode, only in efi mode. If that is the case and you want to boot in legacy mode will need to recreate your partition table as msdos. To boot in efi mode need a 200-300mb partition formatted as fat32 and flagged as esp mounted at /boot/efi

Thanks for your response, colorpurple21859/

I did that. I was not sure if you meant by "flagged" the partition name or the label. I choose the bios-grub as "label".

sda = "mmcblk0p3", being the newly created 2MB bios-grub partition.

Output:
OK, so I did:
Output:
I do not necessarily want to boot in Legacy mode, but since antiX was installed in Legacy mode, I guess that's what I have to do, right? Or, alternatively, I would have to reinstall yet again, except this time in UEFI mode. What is wise/best?

flagged as bios-grub,
you grub-install to the drive, not the bios-grub paritition.

For my understanding, please tell me:
Did I do right to give the new partition the label as bios-grub, instead of the name?

I did:
Output:
So I tried:
Output:

Hi,

I spent some time a couple of years ago experimenting with installing Linux Mint to the Linx range of tablets.. each of these had eMMC storage which was detected and used perfectly fine by the Mint installer. A short while after this, I was asked by someone to see if I could install Mint to their "noname" Chinese tablet. The eMMC storage wasn't detected by the installer but a little research showed that the latest Linux kernel (at that time) did have support.

What I did was this.. I installed Mint to an external USB drive which was attached to the tablet's USB port (via a USB hub. A keyboard, a trackball and a wifi dongle also connected here).
After installing the latest kernel with ukuu, a reboot showed that the eMMC storage was then detected.

I then copied each partition contents across. Finally, I resized the system partition, checked the boot flags and that the fstab entries were correct.

A reboot with the external hardware disconnected resulted in a nearly fully functional tablet. Everything except automatic screen rotation..

Bodge99.

Hey Bodge99, thanks for jumping in.

I am impressed with your inventiveness and success. Since I could not get anything else than antiX reinstalled, I did so a couple of times now, though I still cannot get it to boot. AntiX seems to be there, installed, but the problem now seems to be Grub: either not installed or installed in the wrong place.

I have a feeling that somehow antiX, maybe with the very 1st poor installation, has "monopolised" the eMMC drive so I cannot put any other OS on it. What I am hoping for is that I can get it fixed this time, or, better still, that someone can tell how to force-wipe the eMMC drive so I can install something like Xubuntu. Even Mint might be OK, though I think with 2 GB of RAM that might be just borderline, even if the laptop is only used for browsing and emailing.

Hi,
I've heard of eMMC based hardware that won't properly allow eMMC erasure if it was formatted under UEFI/GPT and deletion attempts made in legacy/MBR mode ... and **vice versa**. This is aside from any "protective MBR" issues with UEFI.

You **will** be able to erase your eMMC, but you'll need tools that actually recognise your Samsung chips. In this case, any Linux distro/live version must have direct support. Once you know exactly which kernel options/addon modules that are required then it should be relatively easy to proceed.

I'll have a look at my old notes to see if I can find anything that could help.. Give me a few hours as the NAS is down for a short while.

Don't forget that installing to a GPT system partition in legacy mode **should** fail (UEFI specifications) but often doesn't properly (due to buggy UEFI firmwares).
The resulting "bixed up" partition and directory structures can be a real mess.. If you suspect something like this is happening then (when able to) use something like Gparted to kill the partition structure fully (Device, Create Partition Table...). Ensure that you use a GPT partition for UEFI mode and msdos type for legacy/MBR mode. Most partition tools (quite reasonably) assume that any devices used are in a "sane" state.. They may not be... Been there, done that!

Bodge99.

suppose to be
If that doesn't work try

This fails on GPT disks, which mirror the partition structure written on the front of the disk to the end of the disk. Both ends must be wiped, which all recent partitioning tools with specific wipe functionality should be able to do. It may be that AntiX, LM and MX partitioning tools choke when both ends of an eMMC do not match. I doubt Atom notebooks are a favorite tool of programmers who build these tools. I don't have any.

teckk said:
You said:
So teckk's advice was wrong in this case. I did not try it anyway.

My processor is not an Atom, it is a Celeron.
In any case, from what I understand you do not know of a tool that wipes both ends. GParted, which is not just any old tool, is NOT able to do it since I cannot even get it started when it is on its own independent USB stick.