LM20 - legacy erase & install issues

[AndyMH]

This is a follow-up to posts by mr_raider - odd behaviour on install with LM20 in legacy mode, so I thought I'll have a look...

Install LM20 in legacy mode (thinkpad T430 BIOS set Both[legacy first]), select 'erase and install' to overwrite a dual boot win10/LM19.3 install in UEFI on sda.

Reboot - why has an 'ubuntu' entry appeared at the top the the BIOS boot list - this is legacy boot, all that should be there is a list of devices??? Select 'ubuntu' and, what a surprise, it won't boot and keeps returning to the BIOS boot list. Select HDD0 and boot into the new LM20.

Why has LM20 created a fat32 partition on a legacy boot? Primary partitions are in short supply on an msdos drive and we don't need the installer un-necessarily using up primary partitions?

So what's in that fat32 partition? Reboot into LM19.0 (on another drive) and have a look:

Looks like nothing*, so delete partition and reboot into LM20.

It did boot, I didn't time it, but subjectively it seemed to take lot longer than the previous boot into LM20 when the pseudo EFI partition was present. Not about to repeat the experiment, life's too short.

Conclusion - I think the mint/ubuntu team have screwed up the legacy install, probably on the basis that they don't care about legacy anymore.

Recommendation - if you want to install in legacy mode, pre-partition your drive with gparted and use the 'something else' option during install.

The other thing I noticed (this was cinnamon), in nemo:

• LM19.0 - devices pane on the left shows the other drives/partitions in the system, e.g. xyzGB volume (there are three drives in this laptop).

• LM20 - under devices - nothing (but the other drives were visible in 'disks'). Guess this is probably a setting somewhere.

For me another black mark against LM20 (adding to the list of display issues, chromium, shutter, encfs-mgr).

*EDIT - didn't check to see if 'show hidden files' was enabled in nemo. Whoops... EDIT2 - show hidden was enabled.

[pbear]

... I think the mint/ubuntu team have screwed up the legacy install ...

Only learned about this bug recently (from your post in another thread). Checking, I see my LM20 VM (Mate) installed with this error, so it's an out-of-the-gate issue, not confined to reinstall. By contrast, an Ubuntu 20.04 VM installed by the same method does not have the error (that is, it's a single partition, as one would expect). Can't image what the Mint team changed (never mind why) to produce this result.

[AndyMH]

It was new to me, but apart from my very first install when I started with mint, I've always used 'something else' and pre-partitioned my drive with gparted.

[antikythera]

There's also a problem with the LMDE4 regarding half and half grub configuration. Only that in this instance with an EFI install the package manager marks grub-pc as residual config. Removing it does a hatchet job on grub2, strips the LM theme and any customisations set by the user since it also removes /etc/default/grub

I've pinned grub-pc

[enyc]

The extra FAT32 partition is a known-bug, as per:-
https://github.com/linuxmint/linuxmint/issues/312
[please do acknowledge the bug affects you there too!.].

The reason removing the partition results in slow-boot, is that the system is waiting for the partition to become available to auto-mount because of the appropriate line in /etc/fstab .... You can get rid of this delay by removing the line from /etc/fstab and also rmdir /boot/efi (empty directory) too to clear-up if you like!.

[AndyMH]

[please do acknowledge the bug affects you there too!.].

I have, only just saw it today noting that my original post was back in July.

The reason removing the partition results in slow-boot, is that the system is waiting for the partition to become available to auto-mount because of the appropriate line in /etc/fstab .... You can get rid of this delay by removing the line from /etc/fstab and also rmdir /boot/efi (empty directory) too to clear-up if you like!.

Well spotted, hadn't bothered to check fstab:

Code: Select all

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=603c5c18-f6d8-4b7e-8e12-1d5a76797806 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=3D5C-DB8B  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1          <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< which has nothing in it
/swapfile                                 none            swap    sw              0       0

Still a bug! Doesn't happen with LM19.3, you just get a single primary partition, all the more reason to use 'something else' when installing mint.