1
I'm trying to install Lubuntu or Kubuntu 17.04 to an external drive. I'm using a IODD 2451 booting an ISO, and installing to an emulated phyical drive backed by a VHD. For all intents and purposes - I'm installing from a livecd/dvd to a regular external hard drive that my firmware detects as a bootable device.
I am running a system with secureboot, and I don't want to turn it off.
Both these variants seem to either not give an option on where to install the bootloader, or ignore it, and don't seem to write the EFI boot files to a ESP partition they create.
While the IODD is a unusual piece of hardware, as far as my computer is concerned, however, these are a regular blueray drive (not important) and a bootable hard drive. It even boots off the drive, sees the other drive and does the install. Lubuntu's installer does not give me a choice of where to install my bootloader, and doesn't create a ESP partition. KDE does, so lets assume I'm using Kubuntu
Kubuntu is happy to create an ESP partition on my external drive. Then proceeds to install my bootloader and EFI boot files to the main drive in my system despite telling it to install to the external drive.
While in theory I could install to a VM then convert, I don't think any free vm software emulates a secureboot system.
So, how do I get either of these flavours of ubuntu to respect my choices and actually install to the drive I want it to without clobbering my other drive?
As I mentioned in chat, you could do a manual install by manually creating partitions (including the ESP) and then installing the base Ubuntu system with
debootstrap
. Then you'd chroot into the new bootstrapped system, installgrub-efi-amd64
, runupdate-grub
, and run the appropriategrub-install
. (not written as answer because this is more a general overview and I can't test right now) – Bob – 2017-08-06T07:52:19.537there's no real rush. I can fix any clobbering of my windows bootloader at this point, and I'm looking at trying to get a system I can use for this with secureboot. – Journeyman Geek – 2017-08-06T07:53:36.230