TIL: When the USB stick won't boot, boot the installer from the hard drive (Garage Door Project, Part 4/5)

Series: Opening my garage door with my phone — Part 4 of 5 Learned: 8–14 July 2026

I could now open the door with curl. For a phone-friendly UI I wanted Home Assistant, and the Pi 1 is far too weak for it. What I did have was an old Fujitsu Siemens laptop (1.8 GHz CPU, 2 GB RAM) dual-booting Windows Vista and Lubuntu 18.04. This post is about turning it into a server, which included a genuinely clever workaround.

1. Fixing Wi-Fi on an old Lubuntu

The Wi-Fi card wouldn’t connect: nmcli device showed it as unavailable, and the GUI said “device not managed”.

Debugging path:

lspci -knn | grep -A3 Network   # Atheros AR242x, but no "Kernel driver in use"
sudo modprobe ath5k             # load the driver
dmesg | grep -i ath             # driver happy, card named wls1
rfkill list                     # nothing blocked

What I learned: the driver was fine; Netplan was configured so that NetworkManager didn’t manage the card. The fix was a three-line file in /etc/netplan/:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: NetworkManager

sudo netplan apply

…and Wi-Fi networks appeared.

2. Lubuntu 18.04 is end-of-life, so pick a server OS

• cat /etc/os-release showed 18.04.5, out of support since April 2021 (Lubuntu flavours only got three years).
• For an always-on box, a headless (no desktop) install leaves far more RAM for the actual work.
• 2 GB RAM is enough for Home Assistant if you skip heavy extras (video processing, big databases).
• On low-end hardware, run Home Assistant in Docker rather than Home Assistant OS in a virtual machine.
• An SSD instead of an old spinning disk is the cheapest speed-up you can buy.

I wiped Windows Vista too. Nothing on it was needed.

3. The USB boot wall

This is where things went sideways. Every installer stick failed:

Things I learned along the way:

• The BIOS was an old PhoenixBIOS: no UEFI, no Secure Boot, no CSM toggle. It only boots MBR/legacy media, so GPT/UEFI sticks are pointless.
• Ventoy’s data partition is exFAT; an old Lubuntu needs sudo apt install exfat-fuse exfat-utils before you can copy ISOs onto it.
• umount, not unmount. (Yes, really.)

4. The workaround: boot the installer from the hard drive

The machine booted its existing GRUB from the hard drive perfectly. So instead of fighting the BIOS, I let GRUB start the antiX live system straight from the disk:

# 1. Mount the ISO and copy the kernel + initrd into /boot
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/iso
sudo mount -o loop ~/Downloads/antiX-*.iso /mnt/iso
sudo cp /mnt/iso/antix/vmlinuz   /boot/vmlinuz-antix
sudo cp /mnt/iso/antix/initrd.gz /boot/initrd-antix.gz

# 2. Copy the live filesystem folder to the root of the disk
sudo cp -r /mnt/iso/antix /
sudo umount /mnt/iso

Then add a menu entry to /etc/grub.d/40_custom:

menuentry "Install antiX from hard disk" {
    insmod ext2
    set root=(hd0,5)
    linux  /boot/vmlinuz-antix from=hd antiX=all
    initrd /boot/initrd-antix.gz
}

sudo update-grub

Each error on the way taught something:

Then: antiX booted to a desktop. 🎉

5. Installing antiX from a live system on the same disk

The graphical installer showed an empty partition list, because the live system was running from /dev/sda5 and the installer locked the disk.

What worked:

1. In GParted: delete the Windows partitions, create one ext4 partition in the free space, and click the green ✓ to apply.
2. Skip the graphical installer and run cli-installer in a terminal.
3. Answer: no repartitioning, root = the new partition, no separate /home, and install GRUB to the MBR (legacy BIOS).

6. Docker on a system without systemd

antiX doesn’t use systemd, which tripped up nearly every guide:

• docker.io from the repos didn’t give me a working docker command. Following Docker’s official Debian instructions did.
• sudo service docker start → docker: unrecognized service. Try sudo /etc/init.d/docker start, or start dockerd directly.
• sudo docker run hello-world is the “is it alive?” test.
• docker: invalid reference format = a copy-pasted multi-line command with broken \ line breaks. Put it on one line:

sudo docker run -d --name homeassistant --privileged --restart=unless-stopped \
  -m 1G --memory-swap 1G \
  -v ~/homeassistant:/config \
  --network=host \
  ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:stable

More things I learned:

• -m 1G --memory-swap 1G caps Home Assistant’s memory so it can’t starve the whole laptop. Changing it means docker stop, docker rm and docker run again; your config survives in ~/homeassistant.
• --restart=unless-stopped brings the container back if the Docker daemon starts at boot. On a SysV-style init that’s sudo update-rc.d docker defaults.
• Files created by the container are owned by root: sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/homeassistant fixes “Permission denied” when editing configuration.yaml.
• Home Assistant felt slow because I used it in a browser on the laptop itself. Use it from your phone or another computer and let the laptop just serve.
• The lightest antiX desktops are IceWM (the default), Fluxbox and JWM.

Takeaways

• “Unmanaged” Wi-Fi on Ubuntu-family systems: check Netplan’s renderer.
• Old BIOS + modern boot media = pain. If the machine can boot its own disk, let GRUB boot the installer from it.
• Not every distro uses systemd. Look for service, /etc/init.d and update-rc.d.
• Run Home Assistant in Docker with a memory cap on small machines, and use it from another device.

Next up: finally connecting the real garage door, and reaching it from outside the house.