I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-02 22:25:36

My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5164 and try as I might, I simply cannot get the Linux on here. Here's the specs:

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7601) Service Pack 1 (7601.win7sp1_gdr.110622-1506)
System Manufacturer: TOSHIBA
System Model: Satellite L755D
BIOS: InsydeH2O Version CCB.03.61.111.50
Processor: AMD A6-3420M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics (4 CPUs), ~1.5GHz
Memory: 6144MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 5606MB RAM

I'm trying this with a USB drive because I've had success with this method in the past, except now. I've tried using Image Writer, Live Linux USB Creator, Universal USB Installer, UNetBootin, and booting the .iso from RAM to create the USB drive, formatting to FAT32 each time. None of that has worked. When I enter the boot menu, this is what I get: http://i.imgur.com/gvzRS.jpg. SanDisk is my USB drive, but it shows up as connected to a floppy disk drive, which my computer does not have. When I select the FDD option, it loops back the screen where I can select the boot menu or the BIOS menu. When I select the USB option, which should work, the computer just boots Windows. I've tried the same methods with Debian, with the same results. The BIOS is up to date. Does this mean my computer is forever screwed out of running alternate operating systems? Help, Linux is so fun.

/dev/zero · 2012-04-02 22:49:33

Have you tested whether other computers will boot off your USB? Until you do a bit of logical troubleshooting, it's a bit premature to blame your hardware. I wouldn't mind betting that you haven't set up the USB correctly. In particular, it seems a bit odd to me that you would specify FAT32.

a7 · 2012-04-03 01:45:29

picklemaster246 wrote:

Does this mean my computer is forever screwed out of running alternate operating systems? Help, Linux is so fun.

Not at all, just got to work out the kinks. Have you tried explicitly specifying the boot device with a "Select boot from device" option generally mentioned at boot?

Just to be sure. When you say USB drive do you mean a USB memory stick or a USB drive enclosure? Also there are some BIOS that will reset the preferred boot order when a USB device has been removed/inserted prior to boot (compared to the previous boot) so keep that in mind as well.

If you select your boot medium but Windows ends up loading this means the BIOS failed to see where to pass control to on that device specified. So double check your are actually writing a Master Boot Record (MBR) to the USB device. The BIOS really isn't all that concerned with what you can or cannot do so long as it finds the next device to take over.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 02:12:03

/dev/zero wrote:

Have you tested whether other computers will boot off your USB? Until you do a bit of logical troubleshooting, it's a bit premature to blame your hardware. I wouldn't mind betting that you haven't set up the USB correctly. In particular, it seems a bit odd to me that you would specify FAT32.

Yes, I've tried it on an HP laptop and got to the starting point of installation just fine. I mentioned the format type because I figured someone would ask me if I had formatted the drive as FAT32. Figured I'd just cover my bases.

a7 wrote:

picklemaster246 wrote:
Does this mean my computer is forever screwed out of running alternate operating systems? Help, Linux is so fun.
Not at all, just got to work out the kinks. Have you tried explicitly specifying the boot device with a "Select boot from device" option generally mentioned at boot?
Just to be sure. When you say USB drive do you mean a USB memory stick or a USB drive enclosure? Also there are some BIOS that will reset the preferred boot order when a USB device has been removed/inserted prior to boot (compared to the previous boot) so keep that in mind as well.
If you select your boot medium but Windows ends up loading this means the BIOS failed to see where to pass control to on that device specified. So double check your are actually writing a Master Boot Record (MBR) to the USB device. The BIOS really isn't all that concerned with what you can or cannot do so long as it finds the next device to take over.

Yep. In fact, if I rearrange the boot order as:
1. USB
2. FDD
3. HDD
I get stuck in a loop that goes from the "hit F2 to enter setup, F9 to change boot order, etc." screen to a black screen, and then repeats. I'm talking about a USB flash stick here. How would I write this MBR to the drive?

a7 · 2012-04-03 02:20:36

How would I write this MBR to the drive?

Well before we get into that: We are creating a Linux boot Live-CD stick from within windows and it has worked on another machine?

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 02:24:55

a7 wrote:

How would I write this MBR to the drive?
Well before we get into that: We are creating a Linux boot Live-CD stick from within windows and it has worked on another machine?

Correct.

a7 · 2012-04-03 02:36:35

We have two hangups that I can think of so far.

a simple setting in the bios is being overlooked
UEFI isn't honoring a legacy MBR boot record (I'm very reluctant to mention this)

I'm not sure if this is going to be relevant but familiarize yourself with MBR, UEFI and GPT by glossing over the following:

I'm gonna get a cup of coffee and think on this for a minute.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 02:43:33

The guy I was talking with earlier also thought an option in the BIOS was being overlooked, but the only option was a USB Legacy thing for USB devices, but I toggled that on/off and it didn't make a difference. I'll get pictures of the BIOS screens in a bit.

a7 · 2012-04-03 02:46:20

picklemaster246 wrote:

I'll get pictures of the BIOS screens in a bit.

Yes please, and ignore my UEFI talk for now; I don't think it is relevant here I am willing to bet it is indeed BIOS setting trickiness.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 03:04:57

Sorry about the image quality, I had to take these with my phone and the lighting isn't the brightest.

http://i.imgur.com/jFfBG.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/W2Vrm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uuDPB.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tifvg.jpg (and the System Configuration menu of that page: http://i.imgur.com/b1Heb.jpg)
http://i.imgur.com/n9ADi.jpg

The exit tab just contains exit and save, exit and don't save, etc.

a7 · 2012-04-03 03:11:42

Sorry about the image quality, I had to take these with my phone and the lighting isn't the brightest.

This is great, don't worry.

Okay so here we are. Make [BOOT SPEED] is *not* set to FAST but is set to NORMAL. It states there, off to the side, that FAST will only boot from internal HDD/SDD.

Could I get a pick of the BIOS screen as it detects drives WITH the Live-CD-USB-stick in and as it shows it being detected or just confirm for me it sees a USB device before it enters setup. You do have a UEFI BIOS by the way so this is fun.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 03:21:40

http://i.imgur.com/zeu3d.jpg

Was that what you meant?

And yes, the boot speed is set to normal.

a7 · 2012-04-03 03:38:12

picklemaster246 wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/zeu3d.jpg
Was that what you meant?
And yes, the boot speed is set to normal.

Not quite, normally as the system boots your BIOS, or UEFI BIOS, will throw up some product branding while in the background it is detecting all the hardware, like hard drives, usb drives and memory. Almost always you can press a key (commonly ESC, F2, F12) to watch as the BIOS is detecting things. That is a great place to be sure that your usb stick is being detected.

The troubleshooting steps I have in mind are these:

verify that the USB stick is being detected by the bios (just because you see and option to set the priorty of the devices doesn't mean it knows one IS connected)
if the stick is not being detected try the stick in different locations on the laptop to rule out USB port problems or USB speed problems
if the stick is not being detected and no other ports work then maybe it can't handle old school MBR booting
can we boot off a Live CD/DVD if this is an option for you

If your InsydeH2O has a problem with this then our option is to make a GPT bootable USB stick with GRUB2 which will be a bit involved (easy really) but you are using Arch Linux so this shouldn't scare you.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 03:52:25

My computer doesn't have the product branding stuff you were talking about. If it's helpful, I can make a video of the boot process as it goes from startup to the Windows login screen. The only options it shows me are F2 - BIOS setup, and F12 - boot selection. Different USB ports don't change anything. I can't make a Live CD now, the soonest I can do that is next Sunday when I get back from spring break.

a7 · 2012-04-03 03:54:24

That will be unnecessary. Hit F12 at boot and snap me a picture of your options. (Don't bother with setup)

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 04:11:02

http://i.imgur.com/gvzRS.jpg

a7 · 2012-04-03 04:26:59

picklemaster246 wrote:

http://i.imgur.com/gvzRS.jpg

Oh, I'm sorry about that. I'm so used to BIOS screens being colored blue like that.

Arch Linux offlicial installer/live cd does not support UEFI so we need to bootup with another Distro or ArchBoot.

Here is the rub. Most of those windows USB-stick-from-livecd write an MBR and install syslinux to boot a image from the USB. This isn't going to work in your case so what you need to do is do what is decribed at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Be … ows_method but use the downloaded ArchBoot iso.

You can get an ArchBoot iso here
http://www.gtlib.gatech.edu/pub/archlin … t/2012.01/ and then write that to your USB stick using the method described above and hopefully it should work.

a7 · 2012-04-03 04:42:26

I should probably ask you intentions with Arch at this time. Are you planning on replacing your native operating system (windows 7 i assume?) with arch or are you wanting to fool around within a livecd environment for fun?

If you are just wanting to to fool around within arch the the arch boot image may be a bit boring, otherwise installation is more possible in your case with ArchBoot because it has more modern tools for your kind of system. If you want to play with arch for now but not go through the hassle of a live-cd-usb stick and keep windows then I suggest downloading VirtualBox for windows and getting your groove on there.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 05:08:43

No luck with the ArchBoot .iso. :\

a7 wrote:

I should probably ask you intentions with Arch at this time. Are you planning on replacing your native operating system (windows 7 i assume?) with arch or are you wanting to fool around within a livecd environment for fun?
If you are just wanting to to fool around within arch the the arch boot image may be a bit boring, otherwise installation is more possible in your case with ArchBoot because it has more modern tools for your kind of system. If you want to play with arch for now but not go through the hassle of a live-cd-usb stick and keep windows then I suggest downloading VirtualBox for windows and getting your groove on there.

I plan on dualbooting Arch and Win7. Windows for the limited amount of gaming I can do with this computer, Arch for everything else.

a7 · 2012-04-03 05:24:40

picklemaster246 wrote:

No luck with the ArchBoot .iso. :\
a7 wrote:
I should probably ask you intentions with Arch at this time. Are you planning on replacing your native operating system (windows 7 i assume?) with arch or are you wanting to fool around within a livecd environment for fun?
If you are just wanting to to fool around within arch the the arch boot image may be a bit boring, otherwise installation is more possible in your case with ArchBoot because it has more modern tools for your kind of system. If you want to play with arch for now but not go through the hassle of a live-cd-usb stick and keep windows then I suggest downloading VirtualBox for windows and getting your groove on there.
I plan on dualbooting Arch and Win7. Windows for the limited amount of gaming I can do with this computer, Arch for everything else.

Okay have you thought out your partition scheme yet or have you already re-sized your Win7 partition to make room for Arch Linux and its partitions? Are you planning on re-installing Win7 itself or use your current installtaion?

We can use a tool in Win7 to edit its boot loader to load Linux (even from from a disk iso, stick or whatever) and forgo all this UEFI compatibility.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 05:28:56

Not entirely sure about the partitions. Couldn't I just make it 50/50 for now and resize later using gparted or something? I'd like to use this current Windows installation since I'm not sure how I'd re-download Windows if the HDD were entirely formatted.

a7 · 2012-04-03 06:34:18

picklemaster246 wrote:

Not entirely sure about the partitions. Couldn't I just make it 50/50 for now and resize later using gparted or something? I'd like to use this current Windows installation since I'm not sure how I'd re-download Windows if the HDD were entirely formatted.

That is my concern, this can be a bit hairy and I'm not sure if the Arch Installer will play nice with the method I'm thinking of. You'll be going manual all the way through with things involving partitions and grub will need not to bash up the Win7. From my experience using Win7 to shrink a disk is far faster then Gparted so do it from Win7. With the leftover 50% of raw disk space you can then partition it how you like for your shiny new Arch subsystem.

GPT (and you'll need gdisk to do this from linux so ArchBoot is the way to go because ArchISO doesn't have it) can handle up to 125 partitions I think it was on a single disk so don't fret. You cannot use fdisk because Win7 on a UEFI system requires a GUID Partition Table so it has already locked in your options.

So the map I'm thinking is something like

/dev/sda Dual booting disk

/dev/sda1 win7-efi
/dev/sda2 win7-everything
/dev/sda3 arch-boot
/dev/sda4 arch-swap
/dev/sda5 arch-root
/dev/sda6 arch-home

Or something similar. Use EasyBCD to make an entry for boot.

The thing to work out is an initial boot into arch to get the game started. Perhaps another entry with EasyBCD to boot from an image would cover that.

a7 · 2012-04-03 06:48:48

Okay I just tried this out but I don't have a UEFI system to do it on so your results may vary. Use EasyBCD and add an entry to boot from and ISO on the hard drive. Let it do its thing and reboot and you should get an option to boot to Win7 and the image you just made.

Good luck and have fun.

picklemaster246 · 2012-04-03 07:12:08

I think I'll wait until I have a blank CD to use. >_>

a7 · 2012-04-03 07:14:44

picklemaster246 wrote:

I think I'll wait until I have a blank CD to use. >_>

Whoa! Nice catch! Yea, get a DVD for this.
I got a UEFI system shipping in tomorrow myself so I'll keep that in mind, thanx.

(or use windows command line bcdedit)

Last edited by a7 (2012-04-03 07:19:18)

Arch Linux

#1 2012-04-02 22:25:36

I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#2 2012-04-02 22:49:33

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#3 2012-04-03 01:45:29

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#4 2012-04-03 02:12:03

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#5 2012-04-03 02:20:36

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#6 2012-04-03 02:24:55

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#7 2012-04-03 02:36:35

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#8 2012-04-03 02:43:33

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#9 2012-04-03 02:46:20

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#10 2012-04-03 03:04:57

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#11 2012-04-03 03:11:42

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#12 2012-04-03 03:21:40

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#13 2012-04-03 03:38:12

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#14 2012-04-03 03:52:25

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#15 2012-04-03 03:54:24

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#16 2012-04-03 04:11:02

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#17 2012-04-03 04:26:59

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#18 2012-04-03 04:42:26

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#19 2012-04-03 05:08:43

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#20 2012-04-03 05:24:40

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#21 2012-04-03 05:28:56

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#22 2012-04-03 06:34:18

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#23 2012-04-03 06:48:48

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#24 2012-04-03 07:12:08

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

#25 2012-04-03 07:14:44

Re: I've been unable to install Arch on my system so far, would like help.

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