Install os from same hard drive

[pinckston]

Hi all, having an issue installing endeavour on my crap Advent Roma laptop, the USB ports won’t read from bios and the cdrom doesn’t work either!
I previously managed to install Q4os from the same hdd, but can’t remember exactly how. I’ve downloaded grub-customizer and have pointed it to the initrd.img and vmlinuz.img inside /arch/…, to no avail. Grub says I need to load kernel first.
I presume this has to do with the options field, but not sure what to put there.
My install partition is sda4, to which I have copied the content of the latest iso. My cpu is AMD. Does anyone have any suggestions on this? I’ve noticed there are 2 initrd.img files too, is it possible to load 2 with grub-customizer, or do I need a custom-40 entry? If so, has anyone got a sample I could copy/paste and amend as required? Many thanks in advance.

[freebird54]

It sounds like you have a few partitions in use - it might be a good idea to post what they all are, and what they contain. There are things which can be done, but none that can be explained without knowing what’s there to be used! It certainly is a tricky problem when it won’t read from USB - but not insurmountable…

PS - grub may not end up being involved - we just need to get you booting into Live OS, right?

[kjw]

Welcome to the forum @pinckston

Here is an example of 40_custom:

    menuentry "EndeavourOS_Atlantis_neo-21_5 ISO.iso" {
        set isofile="/ISOs/EndeavourOS_Atlantis_neo-21_5.iso"
        set dri="free"
        search --no-floppy -f --set=root $isofile
        probe -u $root --set=abc
        set pqr="/dev/disk/by-uuid/$abc"
        loopback loop $isofile
        linux  (loop)/arch/boot/x86_64/vmlinuz-linux  img_dev=$pqr img_loop=$isofile driver=$dri tz=utc lang=en_gb keytable=gb earlymodules=loop modules-load=loop rd.modules-load=loop module_blacklist=nvidia,nvidia_modeset,nvidia_uvm,nvidia_drm nouveau.modeset=1 i915.modeset=1 radeon.modeset=1 nvme_load=yes
        initrd  (loop)/arch/boot/amd-ucode.img (loop)/arch/boot/x86_64/initramfs-linux.img
    }

You may need to change the kernel parameters.

Also note that from memory I believe the iso image cannot be on a partition that you wish to mount during the install process.

If you provide more information as suggested by @freebird54 then I am sure one of the more experience members will be able to provide you with better support.

[pinckston]

Thanks both of you, much appreciated. The custom-40 worked fine, just had to adjust the path to iso. I’ve got a package conflict on update (had to install offline, wasn’t playing well with my router) so I can’t currently do a full update, but I will search about a little before bothering you with it here.
Many thanks again, and my partitions are a bit of a mess (but could be worse! Sda1 is Q4OS gemini (bullseye), sda2 is a 5gb fat32 that has the extracted neo iso on it, sda3 is now Endeavour, sda4 is swap space, and I’ve got a few mb of what I believe is orphaned disk space - my hdd only barely passes SMART! I MIGHT have missed a partition, but again it will be a small remnant of something.