ubuntu will not boot from hard drive after installation

Question

I made a live DVD with Ubuntu 14.04 for a new Toshiba laptop, Satellite C55-B5200. First I found that ubuntu booted easily, though slowly, from DVD. Then I selected installation from the grub menu that offered no boot other than DVD.

During installation, the installer claimed there was no operating system. (It did not see Windows/8.) It said that it was reformatting.

After installation the system would not boot at all from hard drive. It said to insert a bootable device and reboot (words not exact).

I found info online about "Boot-Repair".

I went through the Boot-Repair procedure. During the installation of boot-repair there was a message "/usr/share/boot-sav/gui-g2slaunch.sh line 29 5850 segmentation fault ..."

But boot-repair was installed, so I ran it. It said "EFI detected. Please check options." There was no clue what options or what to check. But I clicked OK. I then ran bootinfo summary. That seemed to go ok. So I re-ran boot-repair for the repair action. The commands it asked me to paste and run seemed to go ok. After the repair the URL is paste.ubuntu.com/7807769. The machine will not boot anything from the hard drive. While booted from DVD it looked as if ubuntu was on sda2 and that sda1 was vfat.

Questions re bios: (1) do I want "secure boot"? (2) do I want UEFI?

Should I try to install again? Or are there possible repairs while booted from DVD?

What should I do?

Thanks.

Solution

Secure Boot is usually OK, but can sometimes cause problems, so it's best to disable it during troubleshooting. Ideally, it will provide some added protection against pre-boot malware (which usually targets Windows but can theoretically affect any OS), so it's worth having -- IF it doesn't cause any other problems. It's possible that Secure Boot is causing your problems, but I suspect a defective firmware.

Your Boot Repair output indicates that Ubuntu should be booting; however, some EFIs have known problems that prevent the system from booting anything but the Windows boot loader (or a program with the same name as the Windows boot loader). There are a number of ways you can overcome this problem:

• Look for an updated firmware from your computer's manufacturer. (They'll probably call it a "BIOS update" or words to that effect, although it's technically not a BIOS.) After doing this, you may need to re-install a boot manager (see below).
• Using Boot Repair, click the Advanced item and select the option to back up and replace the Windows boot loader. (I don't recall the precise phrasing of this option.) Once this is done, GRUB should theoretically come up.
• Download the CD-R or USB flash drive image of my rEFInd boot manager and prepare an image with it. If that image starts, it should boot Ubuntu just fine. If that works, you can either continue booting with rEFInd on the external medium or install the Debian package in Ubuntu. If that works as-is, then great. If rEFInd also fails to start from hard disk, then you can boot to Ubuntu using the USB drive or CD-R, open a Terminal window, and type mvrefind.sh /boot/efi/EFI/refind /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT. (Note the doubling-up of efi, once in lowercase and once in uppercase.) This mvrefind.sh command essentially does what the Boot Repair option to replace the Windows boot loader does, but with rEFInd rather than GRUB.
• Since the computer is new, return it to the store and buy another model. Make it clear (in a letter to Toshiba, if nothing else) why you're returning it. Manufacturers have had more than enough time to fix these problems in their firmware, and yet they keep delivering garbage. They do this because few people complained about the garbage in the first couple generations of EFI firmware, and they'll continue delivering it for years more if people keep accepting it.
• Enter the firmware setup utility and find whatever options exist to control the boot mode. Set the computer to boot in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode and to disable (if possible) EFI/UEFI mode. You can then re-install Ubuntu in BIOS mode, which should set up a BIOS-mode version of GRUB; or run Boot Repair in BIOS mode to do the same without actually re-installing anything.

Comments

[William F. Hammond]

Am I right in thinking it a sign of trouble that, when I first booted with the DVD before installing just to test booting Ubuntu from the DVD, the grub menu did not offer the option of booting Windows/8? And would this trouble be with the firmware? I've found no firmware update.

[Rod Smith]

"No" to both questions. GRUB does not auto-detect what's installed on the computer, so the GRUB on the installation disc offers options to boot Ubuntu from that disc and nothing else. This inability is a GRUB limitation, not a firmware problem. (Unless by "this trouble" you mean your main problem, in which case, yes, it's almost certainly a firmware bug.)

[William F. Hammond]

I think I'm OK now after having switched to CSM from UEFI though it did take several reboot cycles to make things sane. On the first reboot I needed the DVD, but with that grub did offer the hard disk. (Maybe I just needed to do a cold reboot to avoid this.)