1

I'm a bit lost.

So, I have a dual boot Win10/Ubuntu 14 (I think), but it's getting old. The Ubtunu partition is basically done for, I had to Frankenstein it more space for a computer science project and it now thinks it's encrypted, plus I'm having the login loop issue and haven't been able to fix it.

I'm now in vacation, so I have time to make a reinstall, and I'd like to wipe everything and start over. I have an USB with Ubuntu 18, but having a few problems : I tried booting onto it from the GRUB command line (following this great tutorial that worked once), but I'm stuck at the search --fs-uuid --set=root UUID step. I get "failure reading sector 0x0 from partitionX" and "no such device: UUID" (I am sure I have the correct UUID since ls (partition) gives it and tells me it's Ubuntu 18.

So I tried getting around it and using the BIOS to try and boot on the USB, but I have an Acer and I don't know how it happened but it now has a password that I don't know (I searched this and see no solution not requiring me to dismantle the damn thing).

Do you have any idea what to try next ?

Céline Deknop
  • 13

1 Answers1

0

So what you have probably done is you have encrypted your partition with LUKS (which is why it asks you for a password and cannot mount the partition on boot the "normal way" via grub).

If you don't need to access the old ubuntu system and you can simply overwrite everything.

  • run Ubuntu USB,
  • choose "try ubuntu without installing"
  • fire up GpartED application.
  • Once you open it, re-format the "old ubuntu" partition to ext4 again.

This way you'll be able to restart from USB drive and install fresh ubuntu on it.

Jan Myszkier
  • 1,273