bscho wrote: Mon Jan 20, 2020 1:01 am
I have destroyed one SSD drive trying to dual boot with MX.
How did you manage to destroy a drive by installing MX as a dual-boot system? Try as I might I have never managed to destroy my hardware by installing a Linux distro.
Unlike Mint and Peppermint this needs really careful following of the installation I have now put it it on three machines and it has taken me all yesterday though I wrote a very careful procedure for you to follow. See ginamiller.co.uk/MXsuper.php.
I recommend following the pre-installation and installation instructions given in the MX manual. They're very detailed and cover almost every possible installation scenario. Your instructions completely bypass the live persistent USB capabilities of MX and don't even go into installing on systems that use UEFI. I should think people are better off following the official installation instructions from the MX developers rather than those on an unknown person's website. Don't you agree?
I am now using it on a HDD with now 4 operating systems a quadruple boot. I had to add an extra operating system just to fix the install problem as at the end of the install of MX it said Sorry you have no Grub you are on your own. I had to use Supergrub2 and an update grub on all the partitoions but still could not recover the grub so finally I installed I had to use Gparted and resize another Linux Mint 19.2 partition to get 150 Gb and installed another Linux Mint 19.2 ii found all the other operating systems and installed to grub OK.
The MX installer doesn't say anything about grub being missing. It's entirely possible to install MX without installing its grub, and the installation will quite happily complete without it. Then if you already have another distro installed along with its grub just boot into it and run update-grub as su or sudo in a terminal for it to detect and add MX to its boot menu. Bingo, all done.
It sounds like you installed MX's grub to the wrong location so when you rebooted after the installation your system couldn't find the bootloader. Perhaps you also changed the order of bootable devices in your BIOS settings? If you installed MX on sdb, installed its grub to sda, then made sdb's drive the default boot drive there would be no bootloader on that drive and you'd be unable to boot. But as I said, if you already boot using a different distro's grub you can use it to boot MX without installing grub again or changing the boot order in BIOS.
My advice is you back up all your files on a USB or another external drive before attempting this.
I heartily agree! People should be doing regular backups anyway but having everything backed up is especially important when you're going to be repartitioning and installing another OS. In any event it gives you peace of mind.
The problem is the installer allows you to partition using Gparted to make space. But you also have to format that space as ext4 other distros allow you to install unallocated. This distro does not. You must memorize the partition position /dev/sda2 in your case perhaps. Then you have to select the third button saying Custom Install on Existing Partitions to choose where you want to put the install however it opts to install on your sda1 if you only have Windows 7 and that is where your Windows 7 is. You need to change this to sda2 or where you have made the partition. When you click NEXT another screen is very confusing it says using vfat I changed this one time do not do it.
There are only two radio buttons on that screen, auto-install using entire disk and custom install using existing partitions. The second is the default.
Yes, you have to be careful which drive and partitions you select to install MX to, just as you do with all distro and with Windowss, to avoid installing over the top of something else that you wanted to keep. It helps to properly label all of your partitions so it's easier to tell what's what.
Then watch out for another problem when you get to the name and passwords click the button show passwords then you have to enter four this is the only distro I have found that does that. If you do not enter them correctly the next screen will say wrong password and will not allow you to fix then and in my case rotates forever. I do not believe I entered the wrong ones but never did select view as I expect a checker at this point and there must not be one.
I don't know what installer you're using but that's not the way the MX installer works, unless perhaps you're installing a very old version of MX? First, you have to enter two passwords not four, one for the default user account that you create during installation and one for root, and enter each one again to verify that you didn't mistype either of them. Every other distro's installer also requires passwords be typed twice during installation, though some distros don't prompt you to enter a root password as they do everything using sudo. Second, there isn't a "wrong password" message on the next screen. When retyping each password to verify it the password fields turn red until the two match, then they turn green, unless you're somehow using an old version of the installer that does things differently (in which case you should update the minstall package when running a live session after booting from the MX USB stick prior to installing MX.)
By the way, you can click the back button in the installer and double-check all of your choices prior to letting it finalize the installation, although by the time you get to the screen where you set up the user and root accounts it's already erased the selected partitions and is overwriting them. That's why there's a confirmation pop-up after you've selected your installation location that you have to click OK on before you can continue.
