After an long and arduous journey I updated the BIOS and no same error and the installer in Ubuntu crashes before it can run. But as I responded to the person previous the firmware is saying it is legacy for what that’s worth.
Now that you have booted into a “Try Ubuntu” live session in Legacy mode, my suspicion is that your HP PC is one of the rare systems which misbehave when trying to install Ubuntu with default settings.
Some older PCS have trouble booting in Legacy mode when the installer adds a BIOS Boot partition.
This can be avoided by installing to a single partition (pre UEFI style).
This is an old-fashioned installation with only one partition (without a BIOS Boot partition) :-
- Remove all disks – only the installer USB and target disk available
- Boot into a “Try Ubuntu” live session in Legacy mode
- Open terminal and double check boot mode
[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo "UEFI" || echo "Legacy"
- Open Gparted (or KDE Partion Manager) > Devices > Create a msdos partition table on the target disk.
- Close the partition editor
- Open the installer
- Installation type = Manual Installation (Something Else)
- Select free space and click the + sign
- Create one Primary partition with Ext4 file system and Mount point = / (system root)
- Install Grub bootloader to device not to a partition (e.g sda not sda1)
- Do not let the installer “Erase Disk and Install”
- If you see a message/warning about “ESP not found”, ignore it and continue the installation.
- Also ignore any GPT message about bios-grub
- The installer will show that only one partition is to be created and formatted.
- Continue the installation
- Rarely, you may need to flag the partition as boot or bls_boot
Oh goodie! I’m so excited I have an odd one out, I’ll try what you put in there.
I’ll just add a few more lines from the lyrics
I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it
I’m about to lose control and I think I like it
I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it
Wait, so you are running the live session already, which is progress from not even being able to start it before.
So the original error is gone. How does the installer crash (screen photo)? How much RAM does the system have? Given its age you might be a little short on memory. If that’s the case, you should create a swap partition on your target disk, which the live session should detect and enable automatically on startup; if not it’s but a simple swapon command.
Nope even after I create the msdos partition table the installer makes a black square like it’s starting up but crashes no change to previous.
I think it’s time to try Xubuntu 26.04 or Lubuntu 26.04
System specs, please. As I said, it’s probably an out-of-memory situation.
Partial system specification in post no. 8
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Thanks, I missed that. @nube-to-the-butu, it’s still a good idea to update your original post to reflect your system specs in more detail.
Plus, has the system been tested with that much RAM (8G)? IIRC there were some systems that couldn’t cope with too much RAM, purely from an electrical perspective.
I donno, only because I’m responding from the live session. Everything seems to be running great OTHER than the installer. Is that still indicative of not enough RAM?
No, not really.
Can you elaborate, when you start the installation, what happens exactly?
No, 8G should be plenty, but it might get tight because the live session needs RAM to unpack all the contents requested from the live medium.
You can open a terminal and see for yourself how much is available:
free -ht
Also, sometimes you just need to be patient; just because there seems to be no progress doesn’t mean the installer crashed.
When the live session starts up, as with all other machines I’ve installed Ubuntu on, it pops up with a black box that usually is the installer where is starts the “Do you want to install, dual load, ect.” except it stays on for like 5seconds and then it closes. It is the same when you double click the installer again.
That sounds like the GRUB bootloader that runs before the live session. Please do make a photo, if at all possible.
Oh I watch it crash before any installer graphics pop up at all also when I run that in terminal I get back
<ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ free -httotal used free shared buff/cache availableMem: 7.6Gi 2.3Gi 776Mi 522Mi 5.2Gi 5.4GiSwap: 0B 0B 0BTotal: 7.6Gi 2.3Gi 776Mi>
Please put all log and other console/terminal output in pre-formatted code blocks (click the </> icon in the editor first and paste into the new element), ideally wrapped in a “Hide Details” element, if it’s more than just a few lines. See items 4 and 5 in the Posting Guide.
Optional helper script
If you are so inclined, I took it upon myself to provide a little helper script for that. 
So this is the screen, I double click the installer, box, it never gets past the box and the box just closes. I’ve left the live session open over night and nithing happened. And confirmed that nothing was processing.
Looks like you should try “safe graphics” mode of the live session. Again, specs matter! I don’t want to have to guess; it’s much easier when we know what hardware you’ve got.
When I try that it never loads up, it just has a black screen with a blinking underscore but receivs no input from the keyboard