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Hello brothers and sisters.

I've spent the past three days reading forums trying to understand and resolve this problem on my own. I've actually learned something through this problem, so every cloud has a silver lining as they say.

First off, I'm totally new to Linux and know nothing about it. The situation is that I have an old macbook (32bit, 2ghz core duo, 1gb ram, 80gb HDD) and OSX is just too slow and bogged down.

I downloaded the Lubuntu Desktop ISO and with alot of research was able to get it to boot from my USB on my macbook. (Apple makes it so hard to boot none apple oses from USB unfortunately) and my CD drive is broken, so USB is my only option…

What a difference, the system is so lean, so fast, so responsive, I have fallen in love with it.

However, when I try to install the system from the icon on the desktop, I get an error towards the end of the installation — Unable to install grub to /dev/sda - I have since noticed that SDA is the USB stick that I am booting from, rather than my internal hard drive.

After so many retrys, it seems that the installer — no matter what I do, attempts to install the grub bootloader to the USB stick that the live system is running from.

enter image description here

I would really appreciate any help that anyone can offer me, and I would like to say sorry in advance as I am ignorant to Linux and understanding the system.

Hardware is expensive in Vietnam, so i don't really want to buy a new computer and Lubuntu can save me from this burden

Here is a screenshot of the error and log.

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2 Answers 2

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Thank you so much. I followed your instructions to the letter, however it seems that Apple runs a non-standard EFI system, and this was causing issues with the installer.

However if anyone else has this issue and wants to know the solution that worked for me as follows...

I created a 2mb 'bios-grub' partition at the beginning of the disk, re-ran the installer, and it exited with the same grub-fatal error as mentioned before. However I then downloaded boot-disk repair, went to Advanced Settings and selected install a legacy version of grub. Followed the instructions from the boot-disk repair app (copy and pasted commands into the terminal) this then installed a legacy version of grub. I rebooted the system and to my joy, grub loaded and booted to the Lubuntu desktop. I presume it is running a bios version rather than standard EFI version that causes issues with Apple's non-standard efi.

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You installed in UEFI-mode, but it seems you don't have ESP (EFI System Partition). Reinstall and create ESP during install. Needed Partitions:

partition   mountpoint    size       type           flag
/dev/sda1   /boot/efi     200MiB     FAT32   ESP    boot
/dev/sda2   /swap         1.5GiB     swap    swap
/dev/sda3   /             remain     ext4    root

Here and here you will find useful information, take a look at it.

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