By way of clarification, I did not understand that the entire SSD could be repartitioned into one large partition without removing gpt on sda1. Unless I misunderstand the most recent posts, this is possible. Please confirm.

Given that I have not made any progress in installing U Mate on this computer (since my one-day success), I am very happy to do whatever it takes, but (important caveat here) it must be something within my capability that is not going to take another two weeks of handholding to get me through it, and removing gpt according to the guides offered is not within my ability.

I can sure bang the Live CD in there and tell it to do it's thing, but I don't want to screw things up more than they already are by inadvertently removing the partition (sda1) containing gpt. For the record, I had hoped to keep sda2 (containing my old Ubuntu 12.04) in place until I have U Mate 14.04 installed, but I can see that this is not going to happen.

Thanks all

I think you have a serious misunderstanding there. GPT is used on the whole disk, not one partition, the same as the old DOS-style MBR partitioning.

1. Start from the live CD and open the GParted partition editor. Remove all partitions on disk sda, except sda1 (needed for the bootloader) and sda2 (your Ubuntu 12.04 system). This will also remove the swap partitions, but more on that later.
2. Now start the installer. When it comes to partitioning the installer should offer you an option similar to "Use the free space to automatically create partitions". Choose that. Do not choose the option that will use the entire disk. Otherwise use the installer as you would do normally.
3. Let the installer do its work, after that you should have a working installation of Ubuntu Mate 14.04, and your fall-back Ubuntu 12.04 system should be still in place.

Regarding swap: According to the BOOTINFO output you posted your Ubuntu 12.04 system is set up without a swap-partition in /etc/fstab. This in itself is not a problem, but you may run into problems when your system runs out of RAM while using that installation. This can be fixed by copying the line about swap from the /etc/fstab file of the 14.04 installation into the /etc/fstab file of the 12.04 installation (without touching the other entries in that file).

Tobi, very helpful indeed and the live CD is booting up as I write.

For sure I did not understand about gpt. Thanks for clarification.

I will use available space as you suggest, but have one question: should I just use the entire available space and not specify boot or swap and the installer will handle this by itself?

Edit: I have gparted open in the Live CD but I do not see an option to remove sda3, -4, etc. How do I do this to create one large space?

Found it!

Writing to disk

Same result as in all other cases (following the crash of 14.04 two Saturdays ago).

Grub loader comes up with a choice of:

Ubuntu at top and if I choose this, it hangs with
or
boot into 12.04, which will work

but no sign of U Mate 14.04

Arrrrrgh!

Did you unmount and delete the partitions sda3 and above? Was it successful? You should see a message in GParted if it was.

Did you use the Something Else option with the Ubuntu installer? Best to run the boot repair again and post the link here with up to date information.

I did unmount and delete resulting in one large sda3. I do not remember if it reported successful.


I did not use Something Else. I used the install alongside 12.04 which is what I understood I should do. Should I have used Something Else?

BTW, I have done that (i.e., w/Something Else) probably a dozen times over the last 10 days always with the same result (same as today). I do not remember doing it without specifying a /swap and usually a /boot however.

I have delayed leaving for a meeting and will be back here about 8 CST. I plan to run BootInfo, make a copy of the gparted output and can assemble any other information that might be helpful. Please leave a list of everything you might want to see and I will post everything.

After a search for that error messages it seems that this can indicate one of two different things:
1. There was an unnoticed (by the installer) problem when the bootloader was installed. This can be fixed by by re-installing the bootloader.
2. With kernel versions >3.16 there seems to be a problem with some hardware configurations for which I could not really find a solution online. This seems to be the case for you, since the Ubuntu installation with an older kernel boots fine. One possible solution that has worked for one person was entering the BIOS and change the harddisk configuration from AHCI mode to IDE mode, might be worth a try. Otherwise I would think you are out of luck with your hardware configuration.

Seems like it is time to turn the system over, but I will try to change to IDE first.

However, I do wonder why was I able to install Ubuntu Mate 14.04 (alongside 12.04) and it ran quite well for an entire day? This seems to indicate that it is definitely not the first issue, and probably not the second. If it was able to handle UM 14.04 then, which I think is a much lighter footprint than U 12.02, for awhile, why would it not be able to do so now?

Odyssey1942 this is rally a question for the other posters...

Would running "update-grub" out of Odyssey1942's 12.04 install be a solution?...

Here is output:

robert@robert-MS-7641:~$ sudo update-grub
Generating grub.cfg ...
Warning: Setting GRUB_TIMEOUT to a non-zero value when GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT is set is no longer supported.
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-44-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-44-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-36-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-36-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.8.0-29-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.8.0-29-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS (14.04) on /dev/sda4
done

I have not done this before and do have any basis for comparison. Do the results look "normal"?

Also, prob a long shot, but is there any problem with having more than one install with exactly the same username and password on the same drive?

As long as they are in different installations, there should be no conflict between usernames or passwords. You can't use the same username in the same installation, of course, but I assume you're talking about duplications between something like Ubuntu 14.04 and another distro in a different partition. That should be no problem.

Yes, this seems to indicate there's a problem with grub. It's seeing the old version of grub (initrd.img-3.8.0-36) and the new version too (initrd.img-3.8.0-44). I had a similar issue when creating a new install myself.

When you made a new install of Ubuntu Mate, the installer may have asked to install grub and then ran 'update-grub'. Did you choose to install grub onto the new Ubuntu Mate OS?

Also, are you creating a swap partition during the installation process. It's probably better not to to keep things simple. You can always add a swap partition once you've resolved this problem.

You shouldn't have a large sda3 partition. You should delete it so gparted sees it as 'unused space'. This will then allow you to install an OS onto that space.
Once you make another install of Ubuntu Mate, choose to install grub onto the partition of the new OS.


I don't think it's a problem. But it's not good practice.
With linux distros, we have more ownership over the OS which we may not be used to coming from a Windows background.
It's important to be cautious and prepared before setting about creating new installs and new partitions. However, we've all been in the same place and it's part of the learning curve.

I had 4 different linux OSs. I would use them for different types of work. Each OS is given a different personality. This helps with remembering usernames and passwords.

Just back. Thanks for yours. I need to clarify something. I have never seen an option to install grub. Is that the same as /boot?

If not, please help me on the terminology.

If so, I have tried to install both with and without /boot and with and without /swap.

The most recent attempt was with 9GB /swap (sda3) and 30GB / (sda4). No success and producing the same grub menu as mentioned above.

I just deleted both leaving 79GB free space.

Have just now attempted to install into the 79GB, formatting as EXT4 and just calling all of sda /. Same result.

What now?

You will need a / (root) partition for your install. But you don't necessarily need a separate /boot partition.
You may be having problems with the installation options.

Are you installing the distro from your live cd? In which case, where did you get your live cd from?

You can't install an OS into sda. That's the whole disk. It must be a partition on sda. You already have sda1 as your bootloader (it seems) and sda2 is your old Ubuntu 14 OS. Therefore you need to make your new install to sda3 or sda4 etc.

You may consider installing a different OS (not Ubuntu Mate) to see if you can avoid the same problems.

not a long shot and is something I avoid. As a convention i used to add the ver to the end of usernam and pwd, ie username1204, password1204