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Just messing around with my new system and finding myself stuck.

What I have :

  • Windows 10 UEFI installed on my first SATA drive, let's call it drive1 (i.e. : drive1 has an ESP partition)
  • xUbuntu x64 on a flash drive
  • 3 spare SATA drives with 1TB of unallocated memory (let's call them drive2, 3, and 4)
  • a broken BIOS which keeps me from modifying boot order.

What I want :

  • xUbuntu UEFI installed on drive1
  • drive2, drive3, and drive4 formatted and mounted within xUbuntu
  • the system to UEFI boot into drive1 xUbuntu
  • no Win10 at all!

In order to boot into live xUbuntu I have to boot with drive1 unplugged (if not, sys fall into Win10 ; broken BIOS, remember).
When re-plugging drive1 afterward and running gParted in live xUbuntu the software just won't see the hot plugged SATA drive.

How do I force "rescan" for the whole four SATA drives once hot plugged ? Is this even possible after boot?

If not, how do I get rid of Win10 and its ESP partition / replace Win10 with xUbuntu?
Am I running in circles here ? Is there a simpler solution ?

I thought about uefi-installing xUbuntu onto drive2 (with drive1 unplugged) and then reboot with the four drives plugged, but then sys will have two conflicting ESP partition...

TazMayhem
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  • What brand/model system? Or what motherboard. Some have settings to enable hot plugging in the specific drive. Have you update UEFI to latest from vendor? Often combinations of UEFI settings may be required to get flash drive to boot. And most of those settings (all with BIOS) get reset when updating UEFI, so keep track. You can have an ESP on every drive. A few have multiple ESP on same drive, but in effect turn one or other on or active on reboot. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DiskSpace & http://askubuntu.com/questions/743095/how-to-prepare-a-disk-on-an-efi-based-pc-for-ubuntu – oldfred Apr 05 '17 at 15:50

1 Answers1

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If I understand correctly, you don't want to preserve any data on any of your disks. If so, the easiest solution is to use Windows to delete all of the partitions on all of the disks. The computer will then be unable to boot from any of those disks and should boot to your USB Ubuntu installation medium.

Also, there's a good chance that the firmware isn't really defective, but has damaged NVRAM entries. If so, then booting into it (via a boot-time keystroke or by typing systemctl reboot --firmware-setup in Ubuntu -- but the latter doesn't always work) and picking an option to reset all settings to their default may fix the problem. You should do this before installing Ubuntu, since this action often removes all the existing NVRAM boot entries. (That's the point, really; if entries are corrupted, removing them will fix the problem.)

For further background reading, I recommend:

Rod Smith
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  • I ended up erasing / resetting my Win10 drive by plugging it on another, clean, motherboard. My broken system was then able to boot from live usb and the fresh xUbuntu installation was done the simplest way. BIOS is still broken though.. Thank you for the reading, some knowledge on the subject may spare me the hassle henceforward. – TazMayhem Apr 06 '17 at 06:14