Hi, I'm trying to install Ubuntu on my x86 Advanced with just the onboard 8GB eMMC and a 32GB micro SDHC. I install either the Ubuntu 16.10 or 16.04.2 .iso files onto the SD card, and then boot up the system. When the Ubuntu installer runs, after asking me a few questions like which language I want, it then tells me that it needs 8GB to install Ubuntu, but only 7.6GB are available. I assume it's trying to install on the eMMC drive, as my SD card partition is 29GB VFat. Do I need to pre-partition the SD card on a linux system so it has a linux-recognized filesystem (if so, which?) or is a M.2 card required or am I missing something else? Thanks!
You cannot install Ubuntu on the same media from where the installer is running. In this case you cannot install on your SD card as the installer is running from there. Your best option is to boot the Ubuntu installer off of a USB flash drive and install onto the sd card.
the M.2 SSD should not be required, i recently just did something very similar, except i used a USB stick as the install source. If you are able to do that it might solve the problem as you may not have to worry about the BIOS/SD card issue @francescomm mentioned. Also assuming you never installed anything on the eMMC you should not have to do any prep, you should be able to install directly to it. Try using an adapter to plug the microSD in as a USB stick, or use the unetbootin tool to write the ubuntu ISO to another USB stick and try again, you might have better luck just switching the install source. Personally i have successfuly setup mine with Ubuntu MATE 17 on the eMMC and Windows 10 on the M.2 SSD (which has very good performance btw)
My eMMC drive (though I opted for the 32G update) had a very small ext2 partition on it with some files... I'm guessing this was part of the QA process. You might need to delete this partition. You could also try installing Ubuntu with the text installer (I installed mine through UEFI netboot) but I believe there are also iso images for this. The last resort would be to install via debootstrap but that requires advanced Linux/Ubuntu knowledge.
If i recall the Ubuntu install process has an advanced mode that wil allow you to delete the existing target drive partitions and such, doesn't it? This would allow anything pre-existing on the target eMMC to be cleared before the install proceeds fully if i recall it right
From the documentation I can't see how you update the BIOS without having an OS already installed. Can you do it while running a LiveCD?
Thanks, Markus, I have my BIOS updated and can now write to the SD card. The SD card now shows up in the list of partitions during install. Back to the problem with the SD card and internal 8GB eMMC drive pre-installed... I still cannot install 3 versions of Ubuntu onto the eMMC: regular, slimubuntu, and kubuntu. They all fail at the same point , saying the system needs 8GB to install but only 7.6GB are available. I can install them to the 32GB SD card now, but it doesn't boot from the SD or ask me if I want to. I then installed the latest OpenSUSE (v42) with no problems. Once that worked, I tried to install Ubuntu to the SD card, which it did. But OpenSUSE's Grub2 doesn't list Ubuntu on the SD card as a boot option. Any ideas anyone? If not, I suppose I can live with OpenSUSE and curse Ubuntu's installer.
Reason for that is probably that different programs have different opinions of how big one "GB" is. It can vary from 1000*1000*1000 bytes to 1024*1024*1024 bytes, and it seems that those versions of Ubuntu want a bit more space than what 8 GB eMMC has. (Manufacturers usually use smallest possible definition to make their drives look bigger, so eMMC is likely about 8'000'000'000 bytes. If those Ubuntu's think 1 GB is 1024*1024*1000 bytes, a bit strange value, then 8'000'000'000 bytes would be 7.6 GB) As for booting problems, I don't know much about that. (I rarely install several OS at same time.)
