Install on NVME fails about 30 seconds after it starts

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I have a mac mini, and a PC Windows machine, set up for flight simming (Gigabyte MB, AMD64 chip, Good graphics card, 32G RAM). I have tried to install edubuntu and ubuntu 24 on the PC multiple times now, but no luck. I am tasking a realtech 1Tb NVME to be my bootable Linux HD - the drive is in an external usb case.

using BalenaEtcher (first on the mac, and when that failed, I tried using the windows 10 version as well) I downloaded and flashed the NVME with the install .iso

Plugged that into a port on the PC, entered UEFI and set it as first boot item, and then booted to the USB NVME. I chose the default case (first of two) choices in the black, text only screen in all attempts. The machine booted into the install media with no problems.

I configured it thusly: 2G /boot partition, 70G swap partition, the remaining 900+G as / (root, I am assuming). Then when I click to the next screen, and activate the install, at first it appears to be doing it’s job just fine, then after about a minute, it halts with an ‘unexpected error occured’ message, that has no details. I tried to send the sudo …error reporting info to ubuntu.com but that didn’t seem to work.

I tried both edubuntu-25.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS. Same screens, and same failure result after setting up the partitions.

I don’t have any idea where the failure is originating from.

Kinda lost here, and blocked at the first step of my Linux journey! Any help or suggestions appreciated.

Cheers!

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Please correct me if I have misunderstood your situation.

You created the install medium on a 1TB NVME and you want to install to the same disk?

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Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

In addition to answering the question from @tea-for-one please also add the following information, to the extent possible.

  • have you tried something other than Balena Etcher, for example Rufus?
  • do you have Bitlocker enabled?
  • have you tried disabling Secure Boot, Fast Startup, TPM or other BIOS settings that might interfere with the installation process?

Why a 70G swap partition? Nowadays, the Ubuntu installer will create a swap
file, which is more flexible.

Also, generally speaking, a boot partition of 1GB should be sufficient.

Additionally, what is the end goal here? Do you need a GUI desktop or do you intend on hosting with a server?

The server install is text-based but not as scary to go through as one might imagine.

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both tea-for-one and rubi1200 always give good advice.

But to add a bit, have you updated UEFI firmware for both UEFI and NVMe drive? If live installer works you can check versions you have and compare to vendor’s support site. Even new hardware may have update.

sudo dmidecode -s bios-version
udisksctl status

How you partition is very personal. Each of us may have different requirements. But the use entire drive or unallocated space has been the same when my 160GB drive was large. Most suggest smaller / (root) and rest for /home or data partition(s). And with SSD/NVMe drive often best not to fully allocate, so drive can manage space. Also do not confuse a /boot which must be Linux formatted, and is not normally required with desktop installs, with an ESP - efi system partition. The ESP must must be FAT32 with boot,esp flags an is mounted in /boot at /boot/efi. The /boot may be required for server or full drive encryption.

You typically do not put installer on larger drive as most tools that create installer use dd and that totally erases drive. If you do not have a smaller 8GB or so flash drive there are work arounds to use drive, but requires a bit more work.

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Tea for one: Correct. Am I victim of bad AI advice? Or just a serious noob? I will try this then: Load the iso and flash it to a small USB stick. Then plug both machines into the PC, and run it again, using the 1Tb as the target.

rubi1200: No I have only used Etcher so far. No to bitlocker (there is nothing on this PC that is sensitive, it is purely a gaming rig - and almost exclusively used for flight simming).

Why 70g Swap? I read somewhere during this process that I should create a partition for swap that was at least 2x installed RAM. So, from 32G RAM, I added a bit of headroom.

No to disabling Secure Boot, Fast Startup is auto disabled. Not sure what TPM is.

Excellent question on use case: I have been intrigued by Linux for years, and what I am aiming at now is to set up a server for hosting a private LLM - that I can connect to on my mac. My secondary goal is to take this opportunity to test the waters in Linux to see if it could substitute for my daily machine. I love this mac mini m4 I picked up in January, and have been a mac-o-phile for decades, but the advent of client side scanning on every apple device has caused me to consider jumping ship. So, yes I want to install the desktop/user version of Ubuntu to play with, while accepting any overhead related to using it as well as hosting from it.

oldfred: I will heed the general consensus here and just run the ‘auto version’ of the installer, instead of manually setting up these partitions. Wish me luck!

Thanks so much to you all for taking a moment to help this Noob! I truly appreciate it! Going to try tea-for-one’s implied advice and report back to this thread!
Cheers!

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Yes, that’s preferable for your first venture into Ubuntu.

Again, for a new user, it’s better to become comfortable with the procedure.
Plenty of time for experiments later.

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While I normally agree with new users using auto install, not sure if Ubuntu installer lets you choose where to have ESP. It used to default to first drive or normally the internal drive.

I use Kubuntu which uses a different installer and lets you choose, actually requires you to choose the ESP to use.

You want the ESP on the external drive. If only ever booting external drive from same system, can you use ESP on internal drive. But still better to have an ESP on external drive if only for future use. Difficult to add ESP later once you have lots of data on drive.

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Well folks, I am typing this live from my edubuntu linux system!!!

I was freaked out by the auto installer, the first time around, as it auto pointed to my internal windows drive. (duh, should have taken the hint) So I manually set up and ran the installer pointing at the drive that contained the installer! Missed that one, no wonder it failed.

At this point, I am now a fully hatched Linux Noob, and glad to be part of the community. Wish me luck in the future, and be prepped that more (Geez man, that’s obvious) requests sometime down the road! For now, I am just going to explore and play around.

Thank you all for taking a moment to help!

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Top quality penguin reference :smile:

Yep, best wishes

That’s exactly what you should do.
Practice makes perfect

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Welcome

Feel free to ask new questions anytime.

First task should be backup procedure for both Ubuntu & Windows.

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