Hi everyone.

Today in the mail I received a refurbished Asus Eee R011PX netbook. A very smart looking bit of kit with 2 GB RAM (a lot for a netbook).

The problem is that it come with Windows 7 Starter. Obviously that had to go.

I want to install and run Lubuntu but have run into a major issue looking to be related to the BIOS (I can only assume).

I have used unetbootin to install the Lubuntu .iso file and when that is plugged in I can select it as the primary master in the BIOS. Without doing this I cannot select it on the list of boot sequence options.

I have tried another USB stick as well as Linux Mint LXDE to rule any flash drive or distro issues but the problem is that whilst the installation process is running it is installing the distro to the flash drive itself and not the netbooks's internal HDD. Running it as a trial without installation works fine but when you chose the option to install it cannot detect the main hard disk drive to set as the root partition and therefore can only install it within the flash drive. What nightmare.

Has anyone come across with any issues like this before and could anyone kindly provide any advice on getting this installed properly on the netbooks hard drive?

Many thanks in advance.

Jeremy

First, unetbootin isn't the best way you could have put the image onto the USB. A tool like this that directly writes not just the files but all the partition information is the best way to go. That could be your issue right there.

Secondly, there is an option you can add to Ubuntu's boot script to load the OS into RAM. The minimum for this is ~1GB, and with a desktop that light you should have nothing to worry about. That way, you have no choice but to install to the HDD.

Wonder if the internal drive is something like a special ssd? Some of these things don't act as expected. I might be tempted to try using Ubuntu LTS 14.

Maybe an oddity of uefi.

Many thanks,

I shall have a look into that.

All the best.

Jeremy

Netbooks are notorious for being cheap and tiny. I would highly doubt it has either UEFI or an SSD. If it does have an SSD, it would be aftermarket as it came with a 320GB HDD. Couldn't find a definite date, but it looks like the machine is from 2011. Microsoft didn't demand UEFI and SecureBoot as logo requirements until ~2012 with Windows 8, and even then many still used Windows 7 with no UEFI. I know because my Latitude 14 is from 2011 and I have no UEFI woes.

But hey, it's worth a check.

"when you chose the option to install it cannot detect the main hard disk drive "

When setting bios, you didn't disable internal hard drive did you? You simply moved the usb drive above internal for booting in hard drive boot order, correct?

What does bios say you have for internal drive? Is it a mechanical drive?

Generally when you'd have something like this happen, the sata controller isn't being supported in the distro. It is usually when you get a new system as opposed to an older system.

Both your systems were based on the same base (sort of). Could try Debian or OpenSuse or Fedora based OS's just to see if installer will view drives. Some minimal distro's could even be tried.

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