Tried everything, install won't work if it installs at all

If it won’t work then you can just add UEFI boot entry with efibootmgr from the link in my first post for your Qubes installed on another PC from here:

I could find no way in my BIOS to shut off the F12 menu. Will have to do some research. (EDIT: when I look for American Megatrends disable boot menu, I get a bunch of hits on disabling the American Megatrends screen at the beginning of the boot process…useless.)

Unfortunately I couldn’t make heads or tails of what to do with that UEFI entry thing. You’re basically speaking Martian. It looks like I’d have to set it up after booting into the disk I can’t boot from? Otherwise I have no way of knowing its name.

And that doesn’t seem to address the issue with the installer at all.

Another dive through the BIOS settings…still can find no way to disable F12.

I’ve been at this for three days now.

Download and flash SystemRescue ISO on your USB drive:
https://www.system-rescue.org/Download/
Boot from it and in terminal execute this command, assuming that sda is your SSD on which you installed Qubes on another PC and 1 is EFI partition on this disk:
efibootmgr -v -c -u -L Qubes -l /EFI/qubes/grubx64.efi -d /dev/sda -p 1
Or you can do it from Qubes installer ISO in Rescue mode or in installer if you switch tty from GUI to terminal with Ctrl+Alt+F2 or try different F1-F7 keys.

I can only guess that it’s sda as it never booted off that drive in the first place…and the letter assignments seem pretty random. However, when going into Qubes I expect to have just the one drive. (I can guarantee you it’s NOT sda from within ubuntu.)

Anyhow, besides that, if I have to go through what you just described every time I switch OSes…I’ll have to decide if it’s worth the trouble.

You can check if it’s the right drive/partition with this command:
fdisk -l
If you don’t see your SSD in terminal from Qubes installer ISO then try the SystemRescue ISO.

It’s not about switching OSes but about removing the drive from your PC.
At the link in my first post there is a fix to this problem:

That would pretty much be every time I go back and forth to the Qubes OS.

My boot menu lists everything as UEFI (no modifiers) as well as other listings, and so I can’t tell them apart. I have to physically remove the drives I don’t want to be sure of booting where I want. (Right now, I have two physical drives on this system, one a blank drive I couldn’t see in the installer, the other ubuntu, and there are five entries in my F12 menu; two pairs of indistinguishable ones and “ubuntu” which never comes first. Since one of the two disks is unbootable it’s fine in this configuration but I effectively have no control over what boots if there are two bootable disks in the system.

I also admit I have no idea why your username (or mine, presumably) is part of the procedure!

Then you can follow the steps that I quoted in my last post.

It’s just an example EFI entry name that you will see in EFI boot menu like ubuntu. You can name it Qubes for example:

efibootmgr -v -c -u -L Qubes -l /EFI/BOOT/bootx.64efi -d /dev/sda -p 1

The other issue (which may be a non-issue for all I know) is that the drive you’re telling me to boot from was built on another box, on another motherboard with unsupported hardware (and missing hardware that Qubes OS needs). God alone knows whether it would even be a proper install or whether the installer just left out stuff for hardware that wasn’t on that motherboard but IS on this motherboard.

This all goes back to, I need to be able to INSTALL on this system or I won’t trust it to be a good install. Getting it to boot afterwards is step 2.

I’d suggest you to download Fedora 32 installer and try to install it on your drive. If you can’t see drives in installer again then it’d be faster to ask about this problem on ask.fedoraproject.org or search for the same problem there. There are more chances that you’ll get help there if it’s fedora-related issue.

OK, so I did two things…went into the BIOS and removed everything from the boot order that wasnt specifically labeled Ubuntu.

I then powered off, unplugged the Ubuntu drive, plugged in the SSD which I copied from the thumb drive where I installed on the target system (so at least it wasn’t bitching at me about unsupported hardware during the install–a most disquieting thing).

I then plugged in the install thumbdrive.

The system booted off that drive even though it’s NOT part of the boot sequence in the BIOS.

Getting into the terminal, I did an lsblk and it showed me two things…a bunch of stuff hanging off of “loop” and sda. But pulling the installation thumbdrive out, established that sda was the thumb drive.

fdisk -l returned similar results, sda and references to loop.

In other words the SSD is invisible even to the terminal.

It looks like your last suggestion about Fedora is the way to proceed.

Thanks.

[Rant: It looks like the main reason to have all of these different distros is so that someone can arbitrarily select one that won’t work on my system. Honestly (given they both work…which is not true, but roll with me here) what cosmically meaningful difference is there between Fedora and Debian? What makes one preferable over the other, so much so that you’ll develop on it even though it doesn’t properly support a lot of hardware out there? Now when you get to desktop environments, it’s a different story but apparently you can mix and match those. For example I actually use xfce, on my debian release, and apparently Qubes uses it too, if only I could get far enough to see that.]

There are multiple different reasons for every distribution.
For example debian vs fedora:
Debian was released earlier and it’s free and developed by community.
Red Hat Linux (Fedora branched from it later) was released later and was commercial and developed by Red Hat company.

If nothing else at least the Fedora installer is gratifyingly small (a mere 1.9 GB…yes, that should be read with a sarcastic tone) so it might only take three hours to download it.

OK, you explained the history of where debian and RH came from, but that doesn’t explain why an end user today would want to pick one over the other.

And yet I see people wanting to change distros on boxes that came with pre-installed Linux of one kind or another. (“Nice system but I want to run Arch on it.”) Why? Don’t they risk tripping over something that won’t work on that box?

Don’t know about this. I never was interested in this distribution holy war topics.
For me the main drive in distribution selection would be the trust in the maintainers of these distributions. I’d rather use well known distribution with long and clean history rather than some new and unknown distribution the maintainers of which can plant some malware inside.

Fedora downloaded quickly.

It also detected both the SSD that has Qubes (as installed onto thumdrive from the thumbdrive with the ISO on it), as well as an empty old hard drive; it looked willing to install Fedora on either.

It looks like this is a Qubes-specific problem. So I’ll restate (for anyone else joining now):

  1. The Cubes installer doesn’t recognize any SATA drives (just USB ones), even at the fdisk level. Any HDD or SDD is totally invisible to the installer. I can install onto a thumb drive, but the install takes 2 1/2 to 3 hours and the boot is a good ten to fifteen minutes. I can only assume the system would be so slow as to be unusable, plus I wouldn’t trust a thumb drive for my main system anyway on simple reliability grounds (let alone security). [BIOS information given earlier in this thread.] This is NOT a RAID issue, I don’t have RAID enabled.

  2. Conversely, any installation copied with dd to a SATA drive (or installed onto a SATA drive on another system and brought over) is not recognized as a bootable drive by my system. My bios can see it and certinaly lsblk on Ubuntu can see it; it just won’t boot and I’ll be told to insert bootable media.

[sorry it took so long to respond, I hit an upper limit on first day comments apparently instituted to guard against robo spam posts. I couldn’t even respond to a welcome message from the admins to ask them to relax the limit.]

I have a temporary workaround. It runs fast enough for test driving, when run off a Western Digital Passport drive.

Given how much USB is frowned upon, no doubt having the OS installed on a USB drive is making someone spin in their sleep.

Did you try to add EFI boot menu entry with efibootmgr?
Maybe if you dd from your Western Digital Passport drive to your SATA drive and add EFI boot menu entry then it’ll boot.

No, because when I went to do fdisk to get the device ID, it wasn’t even visible there. The method (as I understand it) depends on knowing that.

Did you try to do it from SystemRescue ISO or from Fedora ISO? Or you just tried from Qubes installer ISO?