I've just acquired recently a brand new Dell Precision Tower 5810 with preinstalled Win7 pro. It has 2 disks 4TB each. I tried to install Ubuntu 14.04 as the primary OS wiping everything from the disks but when the installation is over and I try to boot from the Ubuntu entry under UEFI mode in bios the only thing that I get is a black screen with the following options
- Press F1 to reboot
- Press F2 to reboot in to settings
- Enter or change bios settings
Steps I follow during the installation process of Ubuntu 14.04 on my machine
- Boot mode UEFI secure boot OFF
- Boot from usb drive and install normally
- At the partitioning step I choose the first option to delete
everything and install Ubuntu as primary OS on drive /dev/sda - After installation I end up with 3 partitions on /dev/sda
- 512MB efi
- 16GiB /swap
- remaining free space as /ext4 / (root)
After installation when I reboot it gives me a black screen with the message options I described above.
Has anyone faced the same problems? I would never expect to be it so damn hard to simply install an OS in a brand new machine.
Best Answer
Try this to gather more information:
sudo efibootmgr -v
.The
efibootmgr
output will show your boot entries. Here's what it shows on the computer I'm using now:In your case, you should see at least one
ubuntu
entry that points to either\EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi
or\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi
. There may well be other entries, like theUEFI: Built-in EFI Shell
entry in this example. Furthermore, theubuntu
entry's number should appear on theBootOrder
line as the first value. (My output doesn't show precisely what I've described because I'm using rEFInd, not GRUB, as my default boot program, and I don't even have GRUB registered on this system. The Ubuntu Shim/GRUB entry would be similar to my rEFInd entry, though.)If you do not see such an entry, you can try creating a new entry with
efibootmgr
:Adjust the disk (
-d /dev/sda
), partition (-p 1
), and the exact path to the file for what your system uses. There are also ways to do this using other tools; see this page for more information.If you already see such an entry but it's not working, or if the entry you create disappears whenever you reboot, then chances are your firmware is broken. Workarounds are possible in such cases, such as installing the boot loader as
EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi
. In some cases, usingbcfg
from an EFI shell works even whenefibootmgr
in Linux doesn't work, so it may be worth trying that approach.