I apologize if my situation here isn’t clear but I have been trying to figure this out for days and I’m genuinely stumped.
I got EndeavourOS without issue and almost immediately realized I need to switch to something far more beginner-friendly. My flash drive got corrupted, so instead I’m trying to use an external hard drive to boot from. I used the Balena etcher and put the iso onto the hard drive, but when I go to boot, it just takes me back to Endeavour. From what I can tell, my UFEI menu is a little unusual (I have an MSI Cyborg. I can probably find example images of what my menu looks like). Even when I put all USB options above the typical hard drive, it doesn’t even seem to try to boot from my external drive. I know this is not a problem with the iso itself because I tried it with verified files of both Mint and Zorin.
I guess my questions are these: Do external hard drives require some kind of step to boot that flash drives don’t? Is there a command I need to run to make drives bootable? Do I need to do something in grub customizer? I am lost. Thank y’all in advance
sounds like you are dual booting.
If you want endeavour to go away do this: start your computer with any live .iso. Open Gparted. Select and delete everything all partitions that are Endeavour. that’s how I go back to single boot.
if you dont have a dual boot: my advice does not change.
I am not dual booting, at least I’m not trying to.
Live .iso is a term I see a lot but I don’t fully understand what it means. From what I’ve gathered it’s when you boot from an external source rather than an internal one, making the operating system portable and non-permanent. This is what I am struggling with, because it doesn’t open to the iso I put on the external drive.
you installed Endeavour thru a live iso. It’s a USB with an Operating System on it ready to launch. It’s separate from your disk installation. You burned a distro onto a USB is what it means.
You can make a lot of moves from the USB iso like delete partions
I don’t fully understand? I just took a second to try and figure out what GParted is and how it works and it looks like I have to burn it onto something to use it?
I haven’t used Balena etcher before so I am unsure of the process to make bootable drives with that.
But when you say it doesn’t try to boot in to the external hard drive how do you know this? I guess what I am saying is does it just boot straight in to your EndevourOS installation rather than the external drive or does something happen? What does the load order look liek in the UEFI/BIOS?
When you enter your UEFI / BIOS settings, does it present you with a list of boot options? You may need to enable support for different boot devices. Are you able to edit the order of those boot options?
I put it the iso on my flash drive (which became unusable immediately after I did this). I changed the boot order to prioritize USB input. I restarted my computer. And then I installed it. It just kinda worked perfectly.
perfect. you are in the life environment. open gparted. delete all partitions on your disk one at a time like this. Shut down. Remove Endeavour live. Installed Endeavour is now deleted.
Explain what you mean when you say I’m in the live environment when the endeavourOS files are on my computer’s internal drive and fully installed? I thought that was the opposite?
live environment means when you boot Endeavour or any distro off a USB and use it. (That’s a different Endeavour than the one you have installed to disk).
The Live ISO typically refers to the bootable USB ISO.
The term “environment” may be loosely used to refer to that environment, but I would acknowledge that can be a bit confusing.
Yes, I understand that. I can’t get into the live environment to install a different distro. That is my problem. It worked the first time, but it isn’t now.
If you pretended to you were going to install Endeavour again (instead of nuke it) you’d be running Endeabour off a USB in a ‘live environment.’ You created your Endeavour install from that USB and you can delete the hard-disk-installed Endeavour from the same USB.
