Linux grub frustration

[rmcellig]

I reformatted both the main drive and an SSD drive I installed. My old HP PC was from 2008. It ran only in legacy mode. Never had issues installing various Linux distros.

Because the ACEPC AK1 I have uses eufi mode, I'm confused as to what to do. I don't play games. The most demanding thing I do is use audacity.

Do I need to use eufi mode or can I go in the bios, turn off secure boot as well as select legacy mode instead?

When I format my SSD drive in Linux should I choose msdos for the partition table or gpt?

All I want is something easy to use like the older computers I had.

Having installed a few distros to try out, the installation was not the issue. It's grub. I reboot the computer and am presented with the grub cursor or the grub resume cursor. What am I doing wrong? Even when I press f7 to bring up the default boot menu, every item I click on brings me to the grub windows I just mentioned.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

[admin]

Thank you for your continuous attempts on the mini pc. It is an honor for our PC. Because the Linux system has many branches. So we do not have a separate Linux system engineer. I will contact the relevant super users and look forward to your problem being resolved as soon as possible.

[rmcellig]

Thanks so much!! I really want to and need to make this work.

The only distro that I got to work properly and it uses the old grub legacy way is puppy Linux. This distro is super light and fast. It uses RAM instead of writing to the hard drive all the time like Mac vs windows and most other distros.

I have another ACEPC I use for windows 10 pro only. I use it as a server and it works well.

[Zephir29]

Hello,
did you try by using a Linux live USB installation?
I succeed to create a dual boot Win10Pro + Debian using Debian11 Live USB.
I also check from formatted main Disk and by using my USB live I succeed to install Debian 10 or 11.
Just plug USB key, and at startup F7 key then select your USB.
Maybe it’s due to your linux distro, did you try with another one?

[rmcellig]

I was able to install Debian 11 on sdb1, but when I tried to install another distro on sdb2, it screwed up grub.

Right now sda and sdb are formatted gpt and I created a partition 500mb on sda1 as esp for my efi boot files. On sdb I installed Linux mint and used sda1 for my boot files. Works fine but I have to tell you that puppy Linux has been the easiest distro to get going. I did a frugal install of fossapup on sda2. So simple and fast!!!!