As it turns out that installations onto the USB drive are temporary, everything disappears when you reboot the machine. I had completed the entire installation of the MEAN stack before discovering that, rats! It is possible to make the installations on the USB drive permanent, indeed it is also possible with a certain amount of work to get the USB Drive to boot the chromebook which would be sweet, but both looked like they could be nearly as complex as doing the job properly and converting the machine over to Linux. I turns out, Kieron doesn't mind me wiping his machine so I took a deep inhalation, and ventured forward to attempt a real linux install for the first time.
So I rebooted the machine with the USB installed and:
- Select Install Ubuntu from the text menu
- In the install welcome that appears select my language as English and click Continue
- Keyboard layout I select English (UK) - Reluctantly, but what can you do but grimace and click continue
- It offers to setup the Wifi for me, I select my network and click Connect, enter password and click connect, then continue
- Accept the default "Normal Installation" and "Download updates while installing Ubuntu", I also selected to download third party software for Graphics etc" and clicked continue
- I selected to install Ubuntu alongside windows, rather than replace windows, and clicked continue.
- I have two drives, a primary 500GB SSD, and 1TB of spinning metal drives for backup, it selected the 1TB machine and offered me a neat UI showing windows was currently using 9.7GB on the drive, and offering me a slider to select how much to allocate to each OS. I give Ubuntu about 900GB and clicked continue.
- I acknowledged it was unreversible and could take a while and clicked continue. I clicked continue again to confirm changes could be written to file.
- It asks me where I am, I click Dublin which it figured out and continue, but now I'm worried, has it missed my SSD Drive?
- I fill in my name, computer name, a username and password and click continue, it's started installing... IT ain't going to recognise my SSD is it?
- It churdles away for about 7 minutes, it offers me some info on available packages to browse through while I wait.
- Installation completes, I remove the USB and reboot. It offers me Ubuntu or windows to boot, while I'm considering which to try first, it selects Ubuntu and off it goes... I can hear the disks churn as it starts.
- When it stats up, a "df -h" command shows me 775G at /, there's no sign of my 500GB SSD Drive anywhere, everytime I do anything that accesses data, I can hear the old disk spinning!
- Seems my issue is a familiar one... https://askubuntu.com/questions/1127505/ssd-not-detected-during-ubuntu-installation
- I've run through options there, main one being to convert RAID to AHCI, not an issue for me as Bios tells me is already the case, I start the installation all over again in Ubuntu, and now instead of offering to partition, it offers to reinstall into the linux partition I created, ho hum, but there's a do something else option, and in there I can do some repartitioning... And can see the SSD drive, it will even let me repartition it, there's only 50GB available to be partitioned though. I get some hints here, and am able to shrink my windows SSD partition, and try again.
- Not in the "Do something Else" install option, I can see the 256GB space I freed up on the SSD, and I can create partition there!
- So using the GUI, and following advice from here and here, I decided I needed a 20GB swap partition
- This article helped me identify type as primary looks like easiest option for now.
- This one tells me location probably goes in beginning
- Use as, seems obvious to go with "swap area"
- I then created an Ext 4 partition, mounted at / with the remaining space. Reading that sentence, I don't understand that much of it, but was straightforward to do it on the GUI. This device now appears as /dev/sda6 in the list.
- There is still the 900GB boot partition that I had created on the spinning disks.... I delete that, /dev/sdb1 shows as unknown, I click to change it, I click to format the partition as NTFS, and I select to mount it as /windows, hopefully I can now use it from windows and linux, fingers crossed.
- I select /dev/sda6, my new partition as the Device For Bootloader installation.
- I click to install now, again it summarises what it's about to do and asks for confirmation, I click ok and it ask where I am again. I confirm Dublin, continue.
- I fill in my name, computer name, a username and password and click continue, it's started installing. It's going quicker, the hard disk is not grunting, I'm optimistic.
- It reports installation successful, it boots up really quickly, not a squeak from the hard disk completely silent, looking good, A df -h command in the terminal tells me I have 227Gb free on the / drive, 932Gb on /windows, I think I'm golden!
Well technically speaking, I'm golden, I've completed my first ever Linux installation successfully. Hooray! Honestly, not as bad as I thought, I really didn't think I could get to the end of the thing without begging Kieron to help out, took a bit longer than I'd hoped for, been at it for a few hours, but got there in the end!
So now I get to validate my instructions for the installation, as I need to try and follow them again!