Installation occurs without issue but when I restart, the BIOS can’t detect a bootable install. If I live boot with the USB, I can see the installed drive (it appears on the left bar), and the installed Ubuntu 26.04 data is there on that drive… here’s what it looks like from the live USB
I’ve tried with with secure boot enabled and disabled. I’ve tried manually partitioning the install to guarantee the boot partition exists on the drive and it does, still no success.
how do I fix this?
what’s missing from the installation docs? Framework claims to support Ubuntu out of the box, so there must be some missing step, or I missed a minor step that turns out to be critical, etc…
doesnt seem like you installed the bootloader correctly. grub, my lord.
if it has a grub in the first place. A proper install will have a 1024MiB (1.1GB) FAT partition at the front mounted as /boot/efi
Of partition type “EFI System”.
not a guarantee. sometimes it will see a EFI partition on the booted installer or such. and try to write to that instead.
Alas. Just reinstall, but this time do the partition manually.
Remember. a EFI system partition (NOT a FAT32), and then a / (root) and optionally others.
There are also ways to patch in a grub bootloader, via chroot and mounting of your installed system partition. But it’s very complicated.
Ask ChatGPT for details on this.
if you are not fixated on ubuntu, i would suggest try something else, like mint, mx-linux, fedora etc. i used to run into the same problem as you a long long time ago. if you have time to download another iso, i would highly suggest mx-linux 25.2 which i am currently trying on beta bios 3.06. i have not gone back to ubuntu for a very long time
Guides are good, but sometimes there can be subtle deviations from what a user has and what a guide author had themselves. Guides should be thought of as rough guides
I second the recommendation for Mint - their Cinnamon desktop is very good.
It’s not too important for this thread, but if you want your BIOS version in the future, you should be able to get this with fwdupdmgr get-devices. For my current lappy the relevant details are under a subsection called “System Firmware”.
Ok! I installed mint. same issue. Installation process goes fine. It detects and partitions the drive, installs the data, but can’t find the drive to boot from it at startup…
is there a way in the bios to see a list of all the connected hard drives? there should be one: the 256 GB nvme drive I installed mint onto
I feel like i must have surely installed something incorrectly, as NONE of the documentation from framework on installing or setting up an OS on the main board say anything about these kinds of issues, or needing to do manual partitioning, etc… ubuntu and mint are both officially supported distros… So what could i have possibly installed incorrectly?
I purchased only the mainboard for the desktop from framework. the case is an old one, and i purchased the CPU fan and the nvme drive separately. building it was fine, and as I said, i can access the bios and install an OS just fine. from within a live session i can even mount the installation, bind the partitions appropriately, chroot into the install and reinstall grub… nothing…
It can detect the drive enough to install on it but not enough to boot from it? What could i have possibly screwed up to result in this behavior?
Hm, this gives me an idea. I wonder if you’ve changed a BIOS setting to make this drive non-bootable. I’d next do a reboot and then, as it is rebooting, quickly press the BIOS key. I don’t have a Desktop, but it’s usually F2.
From there, have a mooch about for relevant settings, and send some photos here if you like.
This angle would fit your having tried two distros with the same result.
That said, there is potentially some further mileage in the existing approach. Regarding whether the installer is making your disks bootable, Xavier makes some good points. Could you send a new screenshot of the Disks app? I run Mint, and I have /boot and /boot/efi created as standard by the installer.
I’d add that I am pretty sure you don’t need to do manual partitioning for a standard bootable use-case.
So… i guess i can’t actually get into a live linux session anymore… I tried to update the bios and failed, and since then i can’t get the mint to boot from the USB (or ubuntu). I think i may have used the wrong method?
I would regard that as a problem to research/fix first. This is very unusual. Maybe swap the drive to the other NVMe slot? I wonder if it requires you to use slot 0 rather than slot 1 if you only have one drive.
Somehow the MOK error persisted through a CMOS reset… (I completely powered down the board, disconnected it and held down the CMOS reset button for 10 seconds)… I don’t even know how that’s possible…
I want to address the drive, sure, but even if that appears, it doesn’t do me any good if I can’t load a live linux image…
strangely, the my windows USB boots to the installer fine…
I was able to confirm the drive was bad, and replaced it. I can now see the drive from the bios.
I was also able to finish updating the bios by manually calling the capsule app from within the failed command line. bios is now 3.06
And I think I was able to clear the MOK error by trying to load an ubuntu 26.04 image that comes with the mmx64.efi. I was able to continue through the MOK, and now the MOK error no longer occurs…
but the live ubuntu and mint OS images i am using just… hangs … part way through startup…
If this is a separate problem, I tend to recommend a new thread, so that readers can find past solutions most easily. Of course, it may be worth doing a search to see if anyone has encountered these hangs before.
Generally speaking, the Ubuntu installer handles this for you
