Kubuntu installation failures onto eMMC and/or SD card

Daniel Kovecses

3/25/24, 10:09 AM

I have an Acer Spin 1 sp111-31 c3b3 I'm trying to breathe some life into. I have already wiped windows from it through the numerous attempts I've made to install Kubuntu. This will not be a dual boot situation. The laptop comes with a 32GB eMMC onboard, and I put in a 64GB SD card (has no optical drive), I am trying to install from a live USB. The laptop has no real hard drives. UEFI with secure boot disabled.

I can boot into the live system no problem.

Let me group my attempts into two:

1. I try to install it onto the SD card (guided, use entire disk), or '/' on SD card (ext4) and bootloader on eMMC (efi) (manual).

This gives me an error message not very long after: The attempt to mount a file system with type ext4 in MMC/SD card#2, partition #1 (mmcblk1p1) at / failed. You may resume partitioning from the partitioning menu.

2. I try to install onto the eMMC (guided, use entire disk), or '/' on eMMC and bootloader on SD card (manual)

This carries much further, almost to completion, but: Unable to install GRUB in /dev/mmcblk0 Executing 'grub-install /dev/mmcblk0' failed. This is a fatal error. (or mmcblk1 if I try to put the bootloader onto the SD card)

Looking at KDE Partition manager, /dev/mmcblk1p1 is fat32

I gave up on trying to designate swap areas, as far as I know they are not vital, I won't be using the laptop for anything serious or demanding. Having spent hours on this, I read SD cards cannot be partitioned, which could explain why trying to put all or '/' on SD card fails (group 1).

I don't really care whether it's installed on eMMC or the SD card or both. I just want to be able to use the computer. I tried to install grub from the Konsole after the crash, but it says 'cannot find efi directory', even if I mount it: mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /mnt mkdir -p /mnt/boot/efi grub-install /dev/mmcblk1p1

error: cannot find EFI directory.

I have run out of even remotely relevant threads I've found on google to help me, so I would really appreciate some input! :)

0 + 3

partitioning

kubuntu

grub-efi

David

3/25/24, 10:27 AM

Seems on this machine neither of the devices you are trying to use can host and boot an OS. Sorry this is not going to work. That is my experience unless someone else has more to add.

matigo

3/25/24, 1:02 PM

Acer should really be criminally charged for putting garbage like this on the market. None of these machines are usable past 18 months, and none are with using for 18 minutes. The only way you will get any Linux installation on here is to write an Ubuntu Server cloud image to the eMMC directly, then install the desktop packages afterwards. You will probably need a USB Ethernet dongle to make this happen, though as the cloud image will not contain all the drivers that machine will need

Daniel Kovecses

3/25/24, 1:45 PM

@matigo is there a guide to do a server installation like that? How do I write a cloud image to the eMMC directly? do I have to take it out of the laptop an connect to somethign else? could I then install a wlan controller driver from USB, then do the rest online? This is quite a bummer, I thought it's just a specific thing to do with grub... :(

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