Booting the Installer on Intel x86

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Booting the Installer on Intel x86


If you have any other operating systems on your system that you wish to keep (dual boot setup), you should make sure that they have been properly shut down before you boot the installer. Installing an operating system while another operating system is in hibernation (has been suspended to disk) could result in loss of, or damage to the state of the suspended operating system which could cause problems when it is rebooted.

If you have any other operating systems on your system that you wish to keep (dual boot setup), you should make sure that they have been properly shut down before you boot the installer. Installing an operating system while another operating system is in hibernation (has been suspended to disk) could result in loss of, or damage to the state of the suspended operating system which could cause problems when it is rebooted.

Booting from a CD-ROM

The easiest route for most people will be to use an Ubuntu CD. If you have a CD, and if your machine supports booting directly off the CD, great! Simply configure your system for booting off a CD as described in the section called “Boot Device Selection”, insert your CD, reboot, and proceed to the next chapter.

Note that certain CD drives may require special drivers, and thus be inaccessible in the early installation stages. If it turns out the standard way of booting off a CD doesn't work for your hardware, revisit this chapter and read about alternate kernels and installation methods which may work for you.

If you have problems booting, see the section called “Troubleshooting the Installation Process”.

Booting from Linux Using LILO or GRUB

To boot the installer from hard disk, you must first download and place the needed files as described in the section called “Preparing Files for Hard Disk Booting”.

If you intend to use the hard drive only for booting and then download everything over the network, you should download the netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/initrd.gz file and its corresponding kernel netboot/ubuntu-installer/i386/linux. This will allow you to repartition the hard disk from which you boot the installer, although you should do so with care.

For LILO, you will need to configure two essential things in /etc/lilo.conf:

to load the initrd.gz installer at boot time;
have the vmlinuz kernel use a RAM disk as its root partition.

Here is a /etc/lilo.conf example:


image=/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
       label=newinstall
       initrd=/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

For more details, refer to the initrd(4) and lilo.conf(5) man pages. Now run lilo and reboot.

The procedure for GRUB is quite similar. Locate your menu.lst in the /boot/grub/ directory (sometimes in the /boot/boot/grub/), add the following lines:


title  New Install
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/vmlinuz
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/newinstall/initrd.gz

and reboot.

Note that the value of the ramdisk_size may need to be adjusted for the size of the initrd image. From here on, there should be no difference between GRUB or LILO.

Booting from USB Memory Stick

Let's assume you have prepared everything from the section called “Boot Device Selection” and the section called “Preparing Files for USB Memory Stick Booting”. Now just plug your USB stick into some free USB connector and reboot the computer. The system should boot up, and you should be presented with the boot: prompt. Here you can enter optional boot arguments, or just hit Enter.

Booting with TFTP

Booting from the network requires that you have a network connection and a TFTP network boot server (DHCP, RARP, or BOOTP).

The installation method to support network booting is described in the section called “Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting”.

There are various ways to do a TFTP boot on i386.

NIC or Motherboard that support PXE

It could be that your Network Interface Card or Motherboard provides PXE boot functionality. This is a Intel™ re-implementation of TFTP boot. If so, you may be able to configure your BIOS to boot from the network.

NIC with Network BootROM

It could be that your Network Interface Card provides TFTP boot functionality.

Etherboot

The etherboot project provides bootdiskettes and even bootroms that do a TFTPboot.

The Boot Prompt

When the installer boots, you should be presented with a friendly graphical screen showing the Ubuntu logo and the boot prompt:


Press F1 for help, or ENTER to boot:

At the boot prompt you can either just press Enter to boot the installer with default options or enter a specific boot method and, optionally, boot parameters.

Information on available boot methods and on boot parameters which might be useful can be found by pressing F2 through F8. If you add any parameters to the boot command line, be sure to type the boot method (the default is install) and a space before the first parameter (e.g., install fb=false).


If you are installing the system via a remote management device that provides a text interface to the VGA console, you may not be able to see the initial graphical splash screen upon booting the installer; you may even not see the boot prompt. Examples of these devices include the text console of Compaq's “integrated Lights Out” (iLO) and HP's “Integrated Remote Assistant” (IRA). You can blindly press F1^[6] to bypass this screen and view the help text. Once you are past the splash screen and at the help text your keystrokes will be echoed at the prompt as expected. To prevent the installer from using the framebuffer for the rest of the installation, you will also want to add `fb=false` to the boot prompt, as described in the help text.

If you are installing the system via a remote management device that provides a text interface to the VGA console, you may not be able to see the initial graphical splash screen upon booting the installer; you may even not see the boot prompt. Examples of these devices include the text console of Compaq's “integrated Lights Out” (iLO) and HP's “Integrated Remote Assistant” (IRA). You can blindly press F1^[6] to bypass this screen and view the help text. Once you are past the splash screen and at the help text your keystrokes will be echoed at the prompt as expected. To prevent the installer from using the framebuffer for the rest of the installation, you will also want to add fb=false to the boot prompt, as described in the help text.

^[6] In some cases these devices will require special escape sequences to enact this keypress, for example the IRA uses Ctrl+F, 1.