Having trouble getting a live USB to work

Hi,

I'm trying to get a live USB version of Ubuntu 14.04 to work on my M4800. I followed this guide - How to create a bootable USB stick on Windows | Ubuntu .

I am not sure if it has anything to do with the QHD+ screen, but I get some promising signs and then nothing.

I've got two options when I get to my boot menu: legacy or UEFI boot from USB - I've tried both with no luck so far.

UEFI boot gave me a grub menu - I chose try linux, and got nothing but a blank screen after waiting for about ten minutes.

I tried again with the legacy mode and was greeted with a purple screen followed by a rapidly blinking cursor, and then the blank screen again. I waited for another ten minutes, and then figured it wasn't working and came here.

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks!

 

Press E at GRUB with the Linux option selected and add "nomodeset" to your boot option string.

Basically what's happening is your OS tries to initiate a native resolution boot screen before loading Intel's driver, but the GPU does not understand the new spec involved in the process and Linux does not know how to handle this specific GPU. Adding the option mentioned above tells Linux to fall back to the old VGA (low resolution) style boot screen so the display can work. IIRC MS Windows does it by default or something.

I'm not sure why Ubuntu does not set this as default since this is a very common problem. (Using nomodeset does cause its own set of problems, but to a much less extent.)

 

Thanks! I did see that mentioned in a few posts that came up when I did a google search, but I wasn't sure if that was the right thing to try or not.

I'll give it a shot this evening after work.

Thanks again for the help.

 

Ok, that definitely helped, thanks again. I ended up borking the install on the USB stick and will have to start over, but that's part of learning linux, right?

 

You have that correct AlexHawker. When I started out with Linux, I can not count how may reinstalls I did. I highly recommend doing a full image backup with REDO or other program once you are up and running successfully.
I just downloaded 14.01.1 LTS and am installing now. hope I can finally get HDMI audio to TV to work with my Sager (insert emoticon for prayers).

 

Haha I'm on live USB three now... Tried sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get upgrade and completely ran out of space, haha.

I made a 125GB partition on my HDD in the optical bay and installed last night. I managed to not overwrite anything on my windows side but have to figure out how to get the nomodeset to work on the dual boot - was playing with it late last night while drinking whiskey and couldn't get it to work (go figure).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Hmmm, it seems like I need to move all the data partitions on my HDD to the back so I can install linux in the front section (my OS is on my SSD, so I just took that out and am running gparted off the USB stick.

Unfortunately, it looks like this is gonna take a couple of hours...

 

Don't try to do any full update/upgrade on a persistent usb stick. Some updates are ok, but full updates generally don't work right. (I remember reading about it from when I ran a lot of usb sticks).

 

Thanks, I guess I learned that lesson already, but the problem was just that I used all of the free space on the drive.

Now I'm trying to get Ubuntu installed on a HDD with some predicting data, and I just can't seem to get it to work.

I think it installed fine, but I can seem to get the nomodeset working so I can get in and set the right Nvidia driver.

Any tips/ideas?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Well you could add it to the session by inserting the command in the boot line before you boot, Otherwise you would have to edit the grub bootloader to make it permanent.

 

I got it working, thanks. I only needed it for the first boot, in order to turn the nvidia driver on.

I'd been able to do it with the live cd by pressing e - I finally figured out I needed to push esc on the screen with the purple border.