I guess this is a bit off-topic, but…
A Fujitsu Lifebook S762 laptop has become available, so I thought I’d put the Ubuntu for Legato onto that.
It has Win7-Pro on it - which I want to keep, so I followed these instructions:
help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot
But the Ubuntu installer says, “This computer has no detected operating system” - it shows the entire 64GB of the SSD as “free”.
Is there a problem here with it being a Solid-State Drive (SSD) 
Hi Andy,
You’re going to be pushing the brown stuff uphill to share Ubuntu and Win7 inside a 64GB HDD.
Not familiar with the notebook that you’re using - but does it have a UEFI BIOS? If it does, you might have to jump through some hoops to install a ‘non-signed’ OS. Could also be that Ubuntu has issues recognizing the NTFS file system on the disk. Have you done a chkdisk /f on the windows disk in case there is something wrong with the filesystem?
Have a look at ubuntu-12-10-quantal-quetzal-on-fujitsu-lifebook-uh572 for some notes about running Ubuntu off a USB key and dual booting that way.
Best bet is to pick up another HDD and swap it with the SSD and do a clean install.
Or run the Ubuntu install as a VM - I’ve got it all working on VMWare (including the USB to Android stuff) - but you may be able to get it going under Oracle’s VirtualBox. Using a VM may be better, as the internal peripherals are all bog standard - and you’re not going to be stuck looking for weird linux drivers to get something running.
ciao, Dave
edit: Oracle’s VM is VirtualBox, not OpenBox…
It gives the option to boot in either “UEFI” or “BIOS” - I tried both; it makes no difference
But it’s not even getting that far - it’s completely failing to see that there’s anything else at all on the drive!
But shouldn’t it at least be able to see that there’s something on the disk?
Surely it should be able to see that there’s a partition there - even if it can’t recognise what’s in the partition?
No - will do…
What’s the performance going to be like with that (laptop says it has USB3) ?
If it comes to that, I think it’ll be on a different PC…
Hi Andy,
A couple more questions/thoughts:
[ul][li]Does the BIOS have ‘Secure Boot’ enabled? That can stop ‘non-authorized’ operating systems from installing.[/li]
[li]How is the HDD set up in the BIOS - IDE/AHCI or RAID? if it’s set up in soft raid, the Ubuntu installer may not see the HDD. WARNING: if you change this setting, your Windows installation will probably not boot…as the windows HDD drivers will be missing! If you do change it, make sure you put it back to get Windows to run![/li]
[li]Download yourself a copy of Parted Magic from http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/parted_magic.html (older but free version) or from https://partedmagic.com/downloads/ ($5 per download for the latest version). Once you’ve downloaded and burnt it to a CD, boot from the CD and then run the ‘GParted’ application from the desktop. This will investigate all the disks on the system and let you display (or change) the details. If GParted can’t see the HDD the PC is probably a lost cause due to driver/bios/linux issues.[/li][/ul]
That’s an interesting question and probably dependent on the particular USB key being used. But you might still run into issues if the USB3 hub inside the laptop is not recognized by the Ubuntu linux kernel…
ciao, Dave
Hiya,
One more thing … the SSD may be intialized as a GPT disk (rather than the conventional MSDOS partition table). I haven’t had to install Linux on a GPT formatted disk and don’t know how the partition tools see the disk layout.
Let me know what Parted Magic tels you.
ciao, Dave
Well, the laptop doesn’t have an internal DVD; so I was installing from an external DVD connected via USB.
Having failed to install, Ubuntu goes on to run from the DVD - so it seems it must be OK with the laptop’s USB…
Hiya,
With a UEFI bios, I suspect that you had to do some fiddling to get the external DVD to be recognised.
Well… the kernel/drivers used for the installer (or Live) DVD recognise the Laptop USB - but the installers tend to be compiled to support everything under the sun. It’s a good start though.
BTW, I bought myself a Zalman ZE400 USB3 external housing. It’s interesting in that it mounts as both a HDD and DVD. You can keep a range of (bootable) ISO files in a particular directory, and select which CD/DVD ISO file is mounted from the little LCD on the front panel. Saved me a heap of DVDs - and with a SSD inside it’s really fast. And for $70 AU (without SSD) I thought that it was good value.
ciao, Dave
[attachment=0]IMG_20140226_212631b.jpg[/attachment]
And then it shows the same as the Ubuntu installer - that it thinks that the entire drive is unallocated.
So it looks like this is a no-hoper, then?
Hi Andy,
Thanks for the info from parted magic.
I haven’t had to fix a GPT formatted disk (yet), so can’t give you any personal experience. From what I’ve read, there is supposed to be a shadow MSDOS style partition table as well as the GPT partition table … but that may not be required for Win7. I’m a bit hesitant saying ‘let parted magic ‘fix’ it’ in case it hoses your Win7 setup.
I think you’re either going to have to run from USB on this machine, or give up and use another (or a VM).
ciao, Dave