Ubuntu
ubiquity package

Ubiquity Bug: forces Uefi options. I need MBR not GPT.

Asked by Bruce Arnold

Unless I use F10 and Select, I get “no bootable disk” message from my BIOS. I’ve installed separate disks with other Op systems … no problems. (Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.1, Zorin 16, Fedora 35, etc). It seems UB install forces Uefi options. Not good. I need Bios mode or legacy mode. I have disabled Uefi in my bios.
The UB makes my disk install type GPF.

Unless I use F10 and select an option, I get a no bootable disk message from my BIOS. If I press F10, when the screen says, "Please select boot device", I can select the hard drive and the Ubuntu boot screen proceeds normally.

Only 21.10, Budgie 21.10, and unsupported 22.04 show this problem. I’ve installed separate disks with other operating systems without any problems. Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.1, Zorin 16, and Fedora 35, all work fine. I have disabled UEFI in my BIOS and I have also tried the "Something Else" option during installation. I've followed the Ubuntu Handbook for installation.

My hard drive has only 2 partitions: "sda1 core.img and sda2 ext4 /". How can I boot Ubuntu without having to use F10 and select the appropriate drive?

Using gdisk, I found that the disk was still in GPT mode in spite of my changes. I then started over and using gparted created the following MBR disk table:
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
   1 2048 34815 16.0 MiB 0700 Microsoft basic data
   2 34816 62543871 29.8 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem
   3 62543872 96098303 16.0 GiB 8200 Linux swap
   4 96098304 625141759 252.3 GiB 8300 Linux filesystem

I then did a fresh install of Budgie 21.10 and chose “something else”. I had to bypass 5 error messages trying to convince me that EFI was missing. (I knew that!) The install went normally and the computer boots and works perfectly. Note: there is an option in gdisk to convert GPT to MBR but I couldn’t make it work.
I also left the problem on the AskUbuntu site but have not gotten any replies.

I next tried it on Ubuntu 21.10. Works fine. This MSDOS table can be much simpler: A 16MB boot partition and the rest an EXT4 root partition.

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Erich Eickmeyer (eeickmeyer) said : 		#1
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Wim (launchpad-xs4all) said : 		#2

Hello Bruce Arnold,

you start your disk with an 16 Mb FAT-partition.
Probably the installation process is using this part to create an EUFI -boot-partition.

Usually i create disks with MBR-partition without any FAT-partitions at all
(mostly EXT3 /EXT4 root-partition of 23 Gb, flag: bootable
a SWAP-partition (twice the size of internal memory)
a EXT3 /Ext4 partition for /home)

You can do this by starting gparted in a LIFE environment.

Reboot and then start the installation.

( other possibility, longer road: )
install 18.04 i32 XUbuntu, and partition the disk; this will be MBR
IF your machine can handle it, you can upgrade to an a64 version.

After installation, upgrade to 20.04 LTS

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Bruce Arnold (barnold) said : 		#3

Hello Wim,

Thanks for your input.
You may like to check out a parallel discussion on this same subject:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1960141

Revision history for this message
Bernard Stafford (bernard010) said : 		#4

Quote: from your bug report.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1960141/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]
When partitioning please review as stated before ext4 partitioning for Linux.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PartitioningSchemes
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DiskSpace
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

Revision history for this message
Bernard Stafford (bernard010) said (last edit ): 		#5

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiOSBoot
Quote: " unsupported 22.04 show this problem."
Ubuntu 22.04 is still under development, until April 2022, which will have bugs.
"Development" means still being designed and bugs devolved before final release.
This is not an applicable release to download and install at this time.
https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Revision history for this message
Bruce Arnold (barnold) said : 		#6

Quote "Only 21.10, Budgie 21.10, and unsupported 22.04 show this problem".
Quote" Ubuntu 20.04, Mint 20.1, Zorin 16, and Fedora 35, all work fine.".
Let's remove 22.04 from the discussion and talk about any of the others.
Why has the latest installation procedure made it impossible for me to create a simple MBR hard drive?
Thanks for your input.
You may like to check out a parallel discussion on this same subject:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1960141

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