Hi guys I'm having problems installing neon on my new build desktop, I'm wondering if someone can help me out. My setup is:

Asus B350M-A
Ryzen 5 2400g
2x4gb Corsair vengeance ddr4 3200
Toshiba X300 4tb HDD

Just to mention, this is my 1st linux install so please cut me some slack as my experience is 0 I setup up the PC and installed KDE successfully from USB stick. I setup swap 5gb, root 18gb and home 250gb, rest of the disk was left blank, home was encrypted.

I got 1 error: "the partition table format in use on your disks normally requires you to create a separate partition for boot loader" I tried to fix this by disabling fast boot and secure boot on the mobo, to disable secureboot I also had to delete the PK key. After doing that I still got the partition table error so I continued and install went fine and I was up and running.

On use things didnt seem too quick and I got crashes when trying to install programs from the software centre so I decided to do a fresh install... and that's when my problems began.

The new install failed, I got: executing grub install /dev/sda failed

So I tried to format the HDD and start again, but nothing would format it - I tried gparted, easeus live usb, minitool live usb, diskpart from a win7 install disc, nothing worked. I was getting the following error: partitions have been written, but we have been unable to inform the kernel of the change

So I connected the HDD to my old PC as a slave and now it's formatted after some playing around with diskpart and disk management in win 7. My motherboard lost signal to my monitor so I took the cmos battery out for a bit and it booted again, so at this point my mobo and HDD are 100% reset (or they should be).

The problem now is I can't even get KDE to boot from USB stick, the first screen that normally appears: 'starte KDE' / start 'KDE OEM' doesn't appear, instead a circular symbol appears and KDE attempts to load, which fails. On loading I get 'nameserver' and 'partition table load' and 'amd-vi unable to write to iommu perf counter' errors. After it fails I get a blank screen that asks for my neon login and password, but my login details don't work. It still does this when my HDD isn't connected to the system.

So now I'm pretty goosed, even after resetting everything, I cant install KDE from USB, any advice on what to do would be much appreciated.

I'll try & help where I can here.
1st. It seems that you have probably reset your bios so that your system attempts to now boot from your hard drive, not your usb stick. When you switch on your computer with the usb stick inserted, you will need to press either the "esc" or one of the "F" keys to reveal the screen that allows you to boot from usb. Either that or enter the bios & set your computer to boot from usb first.
2nd. With your install, unless you have extremely sensitive information on your computer, I personally wouldn't encrypt anything. You can always keep sensitive information in a separate folder, that you can manually encrypt with either veracrypt or aescrypt.
3rd. If you have nothing else on your computer, then rather than manually set the partitions, why don't you allow the installer to automatically do it for you, and see if that helps.

Hi Waynes, thanks for posting

Re1: It is booting from USb successfully, however I get the following error message



And then on any KDE Neon/Kubuntu/Ubuntu live USB - I get a screen like this:



Re2: Thanks for the tip

Re3: I did use the installer to set the partitions on first and all subsequent attempts. The first went fine, but later the installer failed with executing grub install /dev/sda failed So I formatted/reset everything and now I get the problem in the pictures, which is strange because the Neon installer worked before. Do you have any ideas what I can do?

These installer photos are of Kubuntu 18.04 and thus entirely irrelevant as it's a different ubuntu base version and the installer is (on a code-level) different as well.

apachelogger wrote:These installer photos are of Kubuntu 18.04 and thus entirely irrelevant as it's a different ubuntu base version and the installer is (on a code-level) different as well.

Hi yes but I get the same error message when I use a Neon live USB (which is the OS I want to install) I only tried Kubuntu + Ubuntu to see if they worked or not. When I try Neon the same error message in pic 1 is displayed, the 'install KDE/install KDE OEM' doesn't apppear, instead a circular logo and then a blank black screen that asks for:

Password:

then

Login:
Password:

But they haven't been set as it's just a live USB boot so I'm unable to perform an install

I have an update, I ran Neon live USB again and it booted so I went through the install but it failed at the end again .

I took shots druing install, can someone please take a look and see if I'm doing anything wrong...

I got this every time so I continued...


My HDD...



I chose manual and made a new table, partitions: 5gb swap, 18gb root, 250gb home, rest left free


2nd error message (clicked continue)



Installing


Fail, grub

I'm assuming you have already checked the sha256sum to make sure you have a good ISO! Then the next step is to to the bios and change the boot from UEFI to Legacy, if you don't care about your previous installation. Then chose the entire disk, and that should work.

It literally tells you what to do to fix it.

Ok I got it sorted

For reference, some info here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

I had to set everything in bios to UEFI - either 'first' or 'only', also 'fastboot' had to be disabled.

The EFI mount point was the problem, I did try to fix the error before but I was using the 'reserved space for bios' drop down and the '/boot' drop down and obviously not having any luck.

3 days for a drop down box selection

Thanks guys