Comments on: Install Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu without CDROM Drive

By: Frans Duijndam

Frans Duijndam — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:33:34 +0000

I fixed it!!
Only now it says Error 15: File not Found
I think this is because i used an different UNBUNTU version.

I used a different because the link to;
‘the Alternative Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu .iso file’
is down.

Am i right?

if Yes, could u provide a working link PLZ?

Greetz,

Frans.

By: Frans Duijndam

Frans Duijndam — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:19:15 +0000

I am trying to install UBUNTU on a netbook (with no cd rom and no usb boot) using this guide.

I followed everything in the guide.

I formatted the HDD like this:
3 partitions,
C: 20 gigabyte
D: 15 gigabyte
E: 3 gigabyte (containing .iso and other files)

When i try and install it says:
Error 20: no such partition.

What am i doing wrong?

Greetings,

Frans.

By: Henrique

Henrique — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:19:08 +0000

I’m not sure if this has been solved, but I have the same problem.

When installing 8.04.1 server LTS from a USB stick on a brand new machine that
does not have a CDROM, the installation fails at CDROM detection.

SOLUTION:

Get a shell (ALT+F2) and enter:

$ mount -t vfat /cdrom

and the installation will continue. In my case, it stopped again saying that the
cdrom could not be read properly. Looking at the output on the ALT+F4 screen,
there was a message like:

/cdrom/dists/stable/Release

was not found… Serious bug… There ain’t no ‘stable’ directory, but only one
called ‘hardy’… Tried to link hardy->stable, but it did not work (vfat file system).
So I just copied the entire tree:

$ cp -pR /cdrom/dists/hardy /cdrom/dists/stable

And the installation continues smoothly ’till the end.

By: Matey

Matey — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:27:15 +0000

Mike;
I usually hit escape on the menu at the boot up and then hit e to edit the lines and then try different things, like you said hd0,0 usually works and it is the only partition that works for me,
I have seen menu.lst file change for weird reasons and changes the hd0,0 to hd0,1 or 2 etc and then it wont boot at all.
I used to have another hard drive with xp on it. it was hd1,4 !?

By: mike

mike — Mon, 11 May 2009 20:56:10 +0000

ok, so i have a 1gb install fat32 partition, a 28gb winxp ntfs partition, and grub working from the ntfs partition. when i try to install from hd(o,1) it says it cant mount it. I thought maybe i had the wrong partition so i made new entries to menu.lst installubuntu1, installubuntu2, etc. etc. each with different partition addresses (hd(0,1)) (hd(0,2)……etc. i think i had it right. hd(0,0) is ntfs, and hd(0,1) wont mount. all others dont exist. so, anyway. what do i do?

By: Marc

Marc — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:02:03 +0000

And yes, I know about lubi…

By: Marc

Marc — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 13:15:29 +0000

Why is this so complicated? Can’t there be a tool like Wubi, or perhaps part of Wubi, that takes care of this for you and actually does a FULL installation from the hard drive or other media? I gave up on trying to find a way to convert my previous Wubi experiment to a full Kubuntu installation that didn’t rely on a hijacked Windows NTFS volume. It sounds simple enough… But I feel that there ought to be a GUI tool for this, as it’s essentially just Wubi but with the benefits of a full installation. And whenever I try UNetbootin, the OS boot splash gets appears malformed (with two progress bars, usually) and freezes…

By: ken

ken — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:29:13 +0000

Ok so I had corrupted versions of the iso’s. Both for 8.1 and 7.1 (see my post on the list linked to in the instructions above).

I discovered this not by md5sums.exe, which I thought I had done on these versions of the iso’s I tried, but with the installation menu’s check cd option. Kernel parts of the install package was corrupt.

I just succeeded with 8.04.1. I took care not to do *anything* while the file was downloading. So for the one person who conceivably might have the same problem in the future, I hope this helped.

ps and much thanks to the sysop poster--this was about the only rout I could go.

By: ken

ken — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:15:03 +0000

Just for the sake of the record, I discovered that the kernel line wasn’t working because I needed to change either or both
1)prefix /boot/vmlinuz…path with (hd0,0) ie “kernel (hd*,*)/boot/vmlinuz vga=”… and in the same line 2)change root=/dev/rd/0 to “root/dev/ram0″ and keep the rw -.

I also changed the initrd line to the same style: “initrd (hd*,*)/boot/initrd.gz”.

--I DID have the inital root (hd*,*) line in menu.lst, btw--

Of these three changes, I am not sure which were required changes, but clearly at least one of them was.

Then all kinds of neat stuff happened but when it failed to find a file, it was a “kernel module” -- the install heading was ‘search drives for iso files’ or something similar. But getting into terminal 2 and doing the mkdir and ln commands as specified in the original post in this thread didn’t do the trick--I got back into terminal 1, selected scan for (kernel or iso--i can’t remember) and it STILL didn’t find it.

Possible problems: there was an error in modprobe -? y-something which was supposed to scan the system hardware, but it eventually loaded

-my iso is 8.10-alternate, and that, as of this writing, is the very newest release--my other two files might not match.

-Finally, along those same lines, the program mounted /dev/loop0 to /CDROM, and mounted all the iso files (or so it would appear) into this directory. There was a vmlinuz file in this hierarchy, but it was 2.1M, rather than the 1.8M that I put in the boot directory with the 8.10 iso on my hard drive. The installer error message seemed to indicate that a kernel version mismatch might have been the problem. Possibly it was.

Detail in these kinds of instructions, as long as it is exhaustively clear, is usually necessary. I think they might have explained that the terminals would be part of a mini-linux that grub boots to ramdisk, and not grub consoles. That way I woud have known that my problem was that the basic menu.lst script wasn’t executing properly. Of course, now that I know what those files were basically and what those lines did, basically, it seems obvious.

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:13:44 +0000

Actually, mkdir is not in the Grub specification. When “solution 1″ says “Now you need to Install grub onto either a floppy…” do they mean that somehow there’s supposed to be a minimalist linux os on there as well? What am I missing?

By: Ken

Ken — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:58:50 +0000

I haven’t usec grub before but all the bootable floppies with grub on it fail when I have to cntrl-alt-f2 then do mkdir… That
command is not recognized from the “grub” command line. I’m thinking the grubs i’m using are not the same as the grubs you’re talking about. You really should put a link to a grub floppy in this article.

By: C2easy

C2easy — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:48:41 +0000

just google wubi much more easy

By: Matey

Matey — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:20:52 +0000

19- Anders Sjölander Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 12:38 am
Oh I see, I guess it makes sense to unmount,because you can’t be on the OS using it and then rebuild/change it too!
Thanks!

BTW for those who still run Feisty 7.04, you have to insert these lines into your file, /etc/apt/SOURCES.LIST (of course not in caps). The existing lines refer to some URL which do not exist any more!

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty-security main restricted universe multiverse

By: Matey

Matey — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:05:51 +0000

Can some one please tell me how I could re-install Ubuntu from the CDROM which has been copied to a folder without having to Boot from it?

I am trying to Re-Install Feisty 7.04 bcs of all the errors and problems I currently have.

But I dont see any setup or install files in the CDROM .(I’m new to this)
I copied the whole CD into /media/cdrom trying to fool the system into seeing it as CDROM drive (apt-get wont work and if I use -f it keeps asking for the original CD)?
So… is there any way I could re-install Ubuntu without booting off the CR ROM?

If you’re wondering why?..
It is because the problem OS is a virtual machine.(used XEN) the host server is running fine and is running 3 other xen guests,
I shut this xen machine off via xm shutdown command, then mounted it then I chroot the mounted OS (the 1 with problem) and am trying to reinstall so after I umount it and bring up its image, the thing would run OK.
Right now too many weird problems ?!
I also edited the files sources.list under etc/apt and /var/lib/apt/ to no avail, made things worse.

Thanks for any advice.

By: Anders Sjölander

Anders Sjölander — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:38:34 +0000

Hi,

Just wanted to let you know that there is actually a major problem with this guide and Intrepid. If you have any partitions mounted during the installation process, the partitioning won’t work and no hard disk information will display on the partitioning section of the installation program. This is a known bug (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/288675) and the workaround is to go to console 2 and unmount all drives before running the partitioning. Not being able to have any partitions mounted makes it hard to install from a hard drive.

By: Roger

Roger — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:17:21 +0000

I don’t understand Option 3 above. When I click on “this” to read about Wubi, most of the guide is about burning a CD, but I thought this guide was intended to install Ubuntu WITHOUT a CD ????

By: tom

tom — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:23:24 +0000

nice guide- i actually already installed ubuntu thru wubi, but have an empty partition on my laptop that i want 2 put it on2, so i was actually looking 4 how 2 do that… i read somewhere that it’s pretty simple- that an installer is included in what i now have on my pc- can u tell me?

By: admin

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:10:18 +0000

@Wimpy

I have update the link with latest one

By: Wimpy

Wimpy — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:59:57 +0000

the link for vmlinuz and initrd.gz has expired
just thought i’ld let you know

By: Renan

Renan — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 14:45:17 +0000

I was trying to do “ln /dev/loop0 /dev/loop/0″ but its returns that /dev/loop0 doesnt exists. What can I do for works?