I happened across a mention of a BIOS option that no one else - not the official documentation nor the 99.9% of other forum posters I read - bothered to mention: I needed to switch my hard drive setting from IDE to AHCI.
Because that isn’t necessary for the installation and fixes nothing. It adds hard drive hot plug capability if your BIOS supports it.
(By the way, on Windows you get a blue screen if you flip that setting after installation, Linux recognizes it and activates the corresponding driver during boot.)
They switched to AHCI based on a random suggestion they didn’t understand, rebooted and found out their HDD mounts are all fucked up.
100% that wasn’t the right fix for their boot issue.
Much more likely they just didn’t read what the installer asked during the partitioning process. Or did shit they don’t mention like move around some HDDs inside the case after installation.
(In fact that’s the most likely: unplugged the Windows drive, plugged in a new one, installed Linux on it, then re-plugged the Windows drive and tried to reboot. In that case, you might get the idea that AHCI could help, if you don’t know what you’re doing. But at that point the boot loader and fstab were already misconfigured cause the fully automated installer couldn’t know about the unplugged drive during installation.)
The user tried to solve the problems they encountered and was unable to solve them despite looking for help. The user really tried.
Inconsistent documentation caused by the million distros makes it more difficult to find help and support.
Expecting a new user to know Linux intimately and understand all terminal commands is ludicrous. Everyone has copy and pasted terminal commands without fully understanding them at some point.
I used search on the guide here for “AHCI”:
https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overview
-Not found on those pages.
Because that isn’t necessary for the installation and fixes nothing. It adds hard drive hot plug capability if your BIOS supports it.
(By the way, on Windows you get a blue screen if you flip that setting after installation, Linux recognizes it and activates the corresponding driver during boot.)
They switched to AHCI based on a random suggestion they didn’t understand, rebooted and found out their HDD mounts are all fucked up.
100% that wasn’t the right fix for their boot issue.
Much more likely they just didn’t read what the installer asked during the partitioning process. Or did shit they don’t mention like move around some HDDs inside the case after installation.
(In fact that’s the most likely: unplugged the Windows drive, plugged in a new one, installed Linux on it, then re-plugged the Windows drive and tried to reboot. In that case, you might get the idea that AHCI could help, if you don’t know what you’re doing. But at that point the boot loader and fstab were already misconfigured cause the fully automated installer couldn’t know about the unplugged drive during installation.)
Of course blaming the user, as is tradition among Linux users.
Blaming Linux would make no sense because in this case the problem was caused before they even popped in the installation USB.
The user tried to solve the problems they encountered and was unable to solve them despite looking for help. The user really tried.
Inconsistent documentation caused by the million distros makes it more difficult to find help and support.
Expecting a new user to know Linux intimately and understand all terminal commands is ludicrous. Everyone has copy and pasted terminal commands without fully understanding them at some point.