X1E-78-100 (2026)

Clean-install of Ubuntu 26.04

2026 the simple start

Preconditions

• I had a running installation of an older Ubuntu, se X1E-78-100
• Windows was still installed in parallel
• I did a backup of my data

Steps

• Download the aarchc64 image of Ubuntu 26.04
• Create an installation USB stick (see X1E-78-100#Prepare_a_USB_memory_stick)
• Run the test/install environment
  • Select manual install
  • select the partitions
    • /boot/efi is on my system nvme0p1
    • / is on my system nvme0p6 (it is marked as format/overwrite)
    • /home is on my system nvme0p7
  • Install and reboot

Postconditions

• The grub bootloader does not start
  • In one case, the screen stated white text on black ground:
    • Unexpected return from initial read: Volume Corrupt, buffersize 1000
    • Failed to load image ]]]]: Volume Corrupt
    • start_image() returned Volume Corrupt
  • In another case (during installation, there were already logs complaining about missing write access to boot/efi/...), it took quite long (maybe a minute) that a minimal grub console came up:
    • GNU GRUB version 2.14
    • Minimal bash-like line editing is supported for the first word, TAB lists possible command completion...
    • grub> _
    • you can type some commands here like reboot

Solution

• I did the exact same procedure as above 3 times with different results
  • After the 3rd try (where i did not immediately reboot after installation but started a terminal first and typed reboot there), I had a booting grub, a booting linux and also windows is booting again.

Below I describe some of the scenarios in the hope that these may be of help to the reader.

HP Omnibook X14

Boot selector

There is a build-in boot selector:

• A long-press (30 sec) on the power button reboots your system
• During the first 10 seconds immediately after the reboot, constantly hit the F9 key
• You then can choose between the linux/grub bootloader, a microsoft bootloader or starting from the USB-A memory stick again.

grub

Windows does possibly not boot

In case windows still starts booting but does not succeed and ends up in a black screen:

Most likely I had my external monitor either not connected or not turned on.

Instead I did the following:

• remove all devices from USB ports
• boot into linux
  • run the grub install and configure scripts there

 sudo fdisk --list # search your disk
 sudo grup-install /dev/nvme0n1 # adapt your disk name here
 sudo update-grub
 sudo reboot # to test the boot process

This process did detect the parallel windows installation. On my system, windows was booting again afterwards, most likely I had my monitor then connected and turned on.

qcom-firmware-extractor

When trying to run the qcom-firmware-extractor, it will complain about incompatibilities.

The problem is that the device name does not exactly fit to the expectations:

 > cat /proc/device-tree/model 
 HP Omnibook X 14-fe0

Update the device name in qcom-firmware-extractor and run the script:

 sudo vi /usr/sbin/qcom-firmware-extract # replace the model name by what you have found
 sudo qcom-firmware-extract 
 sudo reboot