Installing an OS over the existing OS

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On 2/15/23 17:36, Phil wrote:
> Thank you for reading this and I know that the subject sounds a bit 
> vague.
>
> I was given a Tosheba A100 some ten years ago that had Windows XP 
> installed on it and it was unusable because it was too slow. I 
> replaced Windows with a 32 bit OS which although slow was at least 
> useable.
>
> That laptop would not boot from  USB and it's DVD drive was dead. I 
> bought an external DVD drive and made a bootable disc which solved the 
> problem.
>
> Moving on another ten years. My wife was given a Tosheba A100 and this 
> one has Xububtu 18.04 installed on it. It is just about unusable 
> because it is too slow. Like my original Tosheba A100, it will not 
> boot from USB and it's DVD drive is dead and I no longer have the 
> external DVD drive.
>
> I was about to toss the laptop when I remembered unetbootin which I 
> used to install Raspberry pi desktop version. Upon rebooting Xubuntu 
> came up without an option to select unetbootin. I had expected 
> unetbootin to overwrite the existing OS but I don't think that's the 
> way it works.
>
> What options do I have and, by the way, I have USB at the top of the 
> BIOS boot options and I have tried selecting USB from the boot list 
> after pressing F12?
>
> It seems that unetbootin no longer installs an OS onto the hard drive, 
> instead it's now used to make a bootable USB drive which I already 
> have and the laptop won't boot from USB.
>
First, a quick warning - the flavors of Ubuntu 18.04 are the last 
versions of Ubuntu to support 32-bit computers, and 18.04 is *almost* 
end-of-life, meaning it will soon stop receiving updates, security 
updates, and support. You may want to install a distro that still 
supports 32-bit systems (like Debian) once you're able to install 
anything at all.

Now to answer the real question, how to install an OS over the top of an 
existing one from within the existing one.

This... is hard. Most Linux operating systems like to be installed into 
an entire partition, and won't coexist well (if at all) with another one 
that's already installed on the same partition. There are tricks you can 
use to install a distro within a disk image file located on another 
operating system's filesystem, but that probably isn't what you want. 
The fact that this is a 32-bit system complicates things since you 
probably won't be able to use virtualization to help you out here, since 
most 32-bit systems don't have hardware virtualization support. And to 
top it all off, if you make a mistake, you may accidentally brick the 
system since you can't boot the system from anything but the internal drive.

However, not all hope is lost. There are three options here that I can 
think of.

1. Take the hard drive out of the computer, plug it into another more 
capable computer, and then use virtualization to install an OS onto the 
drive.
2. Figure out how to get the system to boot from a USB. If it has USB 
boot support, that's hopeful, you may just need to make the bootable USB 
in a particular way in order to get the system to recognize it.
3. Use a live distro (like Puppy Linux) that is designed to be run from 
an ISO file, add a boot entry for it in GRUB, and then simply boot Puppy 
from the image file - you can use the rest of the drive to store your files.

Puppy Linux doesn't have reliable system updates, so I would recommend 
option 3 the least, since it is possibly dangerous for your data. Option 
1 is kinda tricky, but doable, and I'd be happy to give instructions for 
it if you'd like. You will need a USB adapter for your drive though, and 
old 32-bit systems might use an odd type of drive interface so a regular 
SATA-to-USB adapter might not do the trick. It might, though - you'd 
have to take out the drive and find out. Option 2 is probably the 
easiest as it requires no special equipment, no additional hardware 
beyond the laptop itself, and is relatively easy. However it's also 
possible that it just won't work.

Let me know which one you want to try and I'll provide or attempt to dig 
up instructions for it.

-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
https://launchpad.net/~arraybolt3
@arraybolt3:lubuntu.me on Matrix, arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat

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