Moving Ubuntu Hard drive to another computer - Black Screen on boot

James Richters

5/18/24, 12:45 PM

I have been having a very difficult time trying to install Ubuntu 23.04 on a Super Micro Opteron system with 4 processors each with 16 cores 64 cores total, and 256GB of Ram. The USB goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor for a really long time, but then the Ubuntu screen does appear for another long time, but then it fails to find the install media.

So I thought that the issue is with the USB ports on my motherboard, I tried all the suggestions of unplugging the USB and plugging it back in, or trying different ports etc.. I just can't get it to work on that Motherboard. I also saw that there could be an issue with the USB itself. So I put the USB and the hard drive into another computer and everything installed fine. So I know my USB is good. I was able to boot off the hard drive in the other system. So now I thought, great.. I can just put this hard drive in my Super Micro system and turn it on... well that didn't work... it boots to a black screen with a blinking cursor.. and it's not just for a really long time.. I've left it alone for 2 days and it is still just sitting on the black screen with blinking cursor. There is never ANYTHING before the black screen with blinking cursor.

My system was previously an EXSI Server and it worked fine that way, but there is a processor limit in EXSI so I wanted to try to run QEMU on UBuntu. When I first got this motherboard, years ago, I did have Ubuntu running on it for a little while, but I might have changed bios settings to get EXSI to work, I can't remember. EXSI does boot, Ubuntu does not.

So I know my system works. I know my installation of Ubuntu on my hard drive is bootable on another system. How can I make it boot on the system I want it on? Are there some bios settings I need to change to get past this black screen with blinking cursor? Is there some way to diagnose this? Is it even possible to take a hard drive with Ubuntu installed on one computer and just put it in a completely different computer? Or do I need to figure out how to install it on the computer I want to use it on?

At this point I have a Ubuntu USB drive that worked to install Ubuntu on another system that I can't get to work on my Super Micro system and I also have a hard drive with Ubuntu Installed on it that I can't boot on my Super Micro system. Is there some way I can use either or both of these to somehow install Ubuntu on this system? Am I even using the right version for an Opteron system? I am using ubuntu-23.04-desktop-amd64.iso

Any help is greatly appreciated!

James

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raj

5/18/24, 1:23 PM

If Ubuntu isn't even trying to boot (no GRUB, no boot screen etc. appears), probably your machines are set to incompatible boot modes. They should either both boot in Legacy BIOS mode or both in UEFI mode. If the modes are different, the other machine won't boot. Check this setting.

James Richters

5/19/24, 11:25 AM

@raj Thank you for answering my question! I went to check the BIOS settings on my Super Micro motherboard and could not find UEFI Anywhere. so I think that motherboard does not support UEFI. So I did the whole thing again in Legacy mode and now it works great!

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James Richters

5/31/24, 10:47 PM

I was able to make a USB flash drive that could boot on this Supermicro system. I made it with Rufus 3.21 with its default settings made a USB drive that could boot on this system. It worked much better installing directly on the system than trying to move it later. Figuring out that this motherboard does not support UEFI was key in determining why nothing was booting.

Having a USB drive that I can boot on this system has been very helpful as well and will be important if I ever need to revert to a backup.

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