Ubuntu – I cannot boot Ubuntu 10.04 on battery power. What do I do

Finally solved it (probably not the best way to do it, but who cares!) and here's how I did it:

1. 1- Plug in Super Grub Disk2 and boot into Ubuntu
2. sudo apt-get install multisystem
3. Once there it will ask you where to install GRUB2 (don't ask me why)
4. I choose to install it on every disk but the usb drive.

And you are done!

Hope this helped some one.

Correction:

The right way to do this is:

sudo apt-get purge grub-pc grub2
sudo apt-get install grub-pc grub2

Here we choose to install it on every disk available (just in case)

sudo reboot

This is probably a motherboard issue

Your symptoms strongly suggest an electronic problem in the motherboard, since you've noted that it always happens before Windows starts booting up. It's quite unlikely that a laptop AC adapter would do this as the battery should be able to keep the system running even if the adapter failed. If you can confirm that the battery charges, your AC adapter is most likely good. Note that the CPU and GPU are soldered onto the motherboard on this laptop.

A hard drive failure wouldn't cause these kinds of boot-up issues as the system should be able to get through POST, just not load the OS. Bad or improperly-seated memory wouldn't explain this problem, either, as this would manifest as frequent random system and application crashes or the system giving a beep code when powered on, respectively. It's incredibly unlikely that these parts would cause the system to not clear POST with nary a beep code.

The motherboard is almost never a user-serviceable part in any laptop, so you should send it back to Dell for repair. Be sure to back up your data—the best way to do this is to remove the hard drive from the computer, put it in an enclosure, and plug it into another computer for data transfer or imaging.