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RE: https://oldbytes.space/@kianryan/115828017560130597
@feff will know more, but if I understood it all at the time, the TLDR was:
My gaming laptop was not a standard setup - it had "Raid" running whateverthatis, and like two different disks or something? My laptop is 10 years old and especially specced for Gamers(tm).
@JenJen@mastodon.art @feff@comicscamp.club let's put it this way, there was Feff and about 40 IT nerds in chat. Idk about others, but I've been on Linux for 18 years, in Linux IT for 12, worked at Red Hat for 6, worked with the systemd devs reading C and finding bugs for 5 of that, and I had NO CLUE WTF was going on with that grub installation. It gave the most generic error message. And while I'm not saying I solved it, a bunch of folks there are definitely smarter than me and couldn't solve it either. Because at the end of the day Feff ran into something that almost never happens which is a corrupted USB INSTALLER.
I think I've hit that once maybe twice in 18+ years, installing Linux literally hundreds of times. Yes there's a check when you run the USB on boot, but no one does because this almost never happens.
This was NOT a Jenjen issue. This was NOT a Feff issue. The laptop was VERY nonstandard, which threw everyone off and made us think it was the laptop. It wasn't.
Feff you did AMAZING and we all learned a lot from your experience. Thank you for sharing. Especially thank you for sharing the difficulty it took.
And thank you Jenjen for having to deal with people like "just learn how it works". Because NO ONE knows it all. I can't draw for shit. Linus Torvalds doesn't know all of Linux.
Knowing how to troubleshoot and figure things out is far more important. And knowing when to ask for help is also important and something a LOT of people, especially in Linux, don't know how to do.
@ozoned @JenJen @feff thank you! As a somewhat non-technical but also long-time linux user I was super curious what went wong
Jen I'm glad yall got through it, thats kind of a brutally unpredictable roadblock to hit just trying to install for the first time. Had I been graced with such a hurdle my first time I might have just given up all together; I've now been using linux happily for 10+ years
Watching you fight tooth & nail for tech that treats you better inspires me to keep trying too
@ozoned @JenJen @feff It was also an old installer, made months ago iirc? I joined the stream late so I don’t know if it was mentioned at the beginning. I always make a brand new usb installer to be sure I have the latest version. I was as baffled as everyone else and I’m not saying I would have thought of it had I known, but it never occurred to me as I just assumed everyone did the same thing I did.
@Abigyil @ozoned @JenJen
See that's sensible, but I'd never had a problem with the installer before, I had run integrity checks on the USB the week before with no issues, and we had a very good internet connection so I wasn't too worried about it being out of date a little.
Also...the installer was from November...
It was a bit of a double whammy - the set up had a tiny SSD and a massive HDD. The laptop had been set to RAID too.
But the big thing was that the Mint Live image we used initially had corrupted in a very subtle way, where it was perfectly fine as a Live Image, but as soon as you wanted to install grub (the very last step of installing) it would crash the Installer because it couldn't find the EFI partition it had just made.
The error message made no suggestion of a corrupted image, which is why we spent so much time in the BIOS trying to see what hardware option we hadn't seen in years might be causing the issue.
It was only because I gave up and tried installing UwUntu on the SSD alone that it became obvious that something was up on the Mint image (which I swiftly replaced)
So I guess it's props to the Live Image for being almost fully functional even when corrupted, but slightly frustrating as I'd rather have the Live Image fail to boot entirely if the ISO was corrupted. We might have jumped to 'I need to replace the ISO' sooner...
@feff
Oh Gods, that's just a losing battle at that point.
I can't think the last time corrupted image was actually a problem. It was a /while/ ago.
I'm guessing the grub image used for the boot image is independent of the grub package that's subsequently installed. So boots fine, poops the install.
Whatever way, highly, highly frustrating.
*Gets back in to the habit of verifying downloaded images before burning media*
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