I Was Forced To Install Windows 10

[Aupmanyav]

Sorry. Having 4 ( or more ) distributions will require a rigorous precise approach to installation from the begininng. The partitioning must be correct. From the beginning.
Anything else will be heartache, trials, and tribulations.
How much time have you spent fighting with MBRs and bootloaders? Start over, my friend, that's the best way.

True, dybmh. That is what I am doing now. With normal Debian/Ubuntu based linuxes it is no problem, thy are all similar. But others create problems.
Let me first get my berings, then I will come back to you.
Yeah, VM is wonderful,.
(Dybmh, grant me the favor of knowing your first name, or would you like to be addressed only as dybmh.
My first name is Amar, but I prefer the shortened nick - Aup. )

Noticed one thing, Budgie creates problems. Solus Mate would be OK. Mate will require a Fat 32 Boot, ESP partition. In case of Lubuntu, it should be 18.04 LTS or 19.10. But I think you already know that.

 

[dybmh]

(Dybmh, grant me the favor of knowing your first name, or would you like to be addressed only as dybmh.
My first name is Amar, but I prefer the shortened nick - Aup. )

Hi Amar, I'm Daniel or Dan. I use both interchangeably. dybmh is an acronym for my Hebrew Name ( First-Name Middle-Name "son of" Dad's-First-name Dad's-Middle-name )

Let me first get my berings, then I will come back to you.

Sure. I'll send you a PM so that we can continue the discussion if needed. Partitioning seems to be the biggest roadblock on your laptop. See below:

Noticed one thing, Budgie creates problems. Solus Mate would be OK. Mate will require a Fat 32 Boot, ESP partition. In case of Lubuntu, it should be 18.04 LTS or 19.10. But I think you already know that.

I had no problems with Solus Bugie...
I installed Mint with Mate and it didn't require anything other than ext4 filesystems and a swap. I installed it both as a virtual machine and as a native OS while quad-booting ( Mint was the 3rd OS installed ). No fat32, no ESP partition...

I'm using Lubuntu 19.04... BTW

I'm wondering if the original partitions when the Laptop was purchased are still on the hard drive. Fat32 and an ESP partition sound like remnants of Lenovo's Windows build that comes with the laptop. I think they include a recovery partition so that a customer can reset/reinstall Windows back to factory condition. If so, that would make the multi-boot a little more complicated. And in order to trying simulate it here, I'd need to find a Lenovo system to clone... I might be able to figure something out... hmmmm....

 

[Aupmanyav]

Hi Dan, I find no problem with partitioning, GParted does it well. However, my machine is old with just 4GB Ram. Ubuntu Budgie said it requires 8 GB.
In that case, if I write my name in the South Indian way, it would be JBK Amarnath, J for my city, Jodhpur, B for my grandpa, K for my pa, and Amarnath, yours sincerely. But no, North Indians do not put it that way, just the name and surname, which is Reu. There are Europeans with this surname also, although I do not see any connection.
Best regards.

 

[dybmh]

I find no problem with partitioning

swap first, then home, then an extended partition filling up the space. Then create logical partitions for each of the 5 distributions you are testing. Everything can be formatted ext4. Always install grub on /dev/sda ( aka the drive mounted on /home ).

Doing this ^^ you can multi-boot 5 distributions on a 320GB drive. I am sure you can get it work, Aup...

Otherwise, using VirtualBox precludes the needs for any custom partitioning. For this method, each distribution installs with all the defaults.

 

[Aupmanyav]

It is a long story. I had it working nicely, but the experimental bug made me have /home for all was in one partition. That did not succeed and was not really necessary. So I formated the hard disk. I thought I would load a distribution from the USB. But in USB, I had only Solus Budgie, which will not load on my computer. So I turned to Puppy and Proteus, but I could not load them on the hard disk. So, I had to look for a savior. The savior, a Mint 19.2 was on my daughter-in-law's computer. But that computer was under McCaffee protection controlled by my son.

So I could not reach my savior because I could not sign in. Then I opened Firefox and text editor. collected the letters that made my password. Surprisingly, McCaffee allowed me to copy paste the password (Linux does not allow that, one has to type it in). Finally I reached my savior, loaded it on the USB and installed it on my computer. So, everything is OK now. I will load compatible distributions (leisurely, no hurry) and use VirtualBox for the non-compatible distributions. These are the pitfalls of experimentation.

Oh yes, I always use sda1 or 2 (in case of Mx) for Grub. But some day, the bug will bite me again and I will try to remove MBR because the partitions are GPT. But not immediately.

 

[dybmh]

It is a long story. I had it working nicely, but the experimental bug made me have /home for all was in one partition. That did not succeed and was not really necessary. So I formated the hard disk. I thought I would load a distribution from the USB. But in USB, I had only Solus Budgie, which will not load on my computer. So I turned to Puppy and Proteus, but I could not load them on the hard disk. So, I had to look for a savior. The savior, a Mint 19.2 was on my daughter-in-law's computer. But that computer was under McCaffee protection controlled by my son.

So I could not reach my savior because I could not sign in. Then I opened Firefox and text editor. collected the letters that made my password. Surprisingly, McCaffee allowed me to copy paste the password (Linux does not allow that, one has to type it in). Finally I reached my savior, loaded it on the USB and installed it on my computer. So, everything is OK now. I will load compatible distributions (leisurely, no hurry) and use VirtualBox for the non-compatible distributions. These are the pitfalls of experimentation.

Oh yes, I always use sda1 or 2 (in case of Mx) for Grub. But some day, the bug will bite me again and I will try to remove MBR because the partitions are GPT. But not immediately.

Yes, I've had to do stuff like that in the past.

 

[Aupmanyav]

My current wallpaper titled 'Saptarishi' (Seven Sages, base Linux Mint):
@dybmh

 

[Aupmanyav]

But I was not able to handle Manjaro or Porteus, though Porteus Kiosk was OK.