I tried a bunch of times to install Ubuntu Budgie 20.04.3 on an old Acer Spin 1. Every time it would get almost all the way through but then fail when trying to install grub. After days spent trying to figure it out it seemed that something about the type of hard drive was the problem and it felt out of my league to fix it so I gave up, and opted for a bootable USB stick with persistent storage instead.
This has been working fine once I get it booted, but every time I reboot it sends me to grub and I have to run
set prefix=(hdx,y)/boot/grub
set root=(hdx,y)
insmod normal
normal
before it takes me to the grub boot screen and eventually boots.
Several help articles suggested editing the /etc/default/grub
file as follows:
GRUB_SAVEDEFAULT=true
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
which I did, but this didn't help. I'm unable to run update-grub
(When I try I get error: failed to get canonical path of '/cow'
) while running from the live USB, I assume for the reasons cited in this answer: Can't update grub on persistent live USB, but that question doesn't include a solution that I can understand.
Is there any way to fix grub when running from a persistent live USB? I can't boot at all without a USB stick since the ubuntu installation always fails when it gets to grub. I can see all the budgie desktop files on the hard drive of the laptop, I just can't boot it.
I don't mind running from persistent bootable USB if that's the only solution, I would just like to be able to boot into it directly wihout having to set prefix
and set root
manually every time.
ETA: I see that my question is very similar to this one: Set default grub partition but I can't run grub-customizer for probably the same reasons I can't run grub-update -- I get the same error message (failed to get canonical path of '/cow'
)