Ubuntu – Not able to boot after installing ubuntu 14.04 on a brand new dell precision tower 5810

bootgrub2partitioningsystem-installationuefi

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

  1. Press F1 to reboot
  2. Press F2 to reboot in to settings
  3. Enter or change bios settings

Steps I follow during the installation process of Ubuntu 14.04 on my machine

  1. Boot mode UEFI secure boot OFF
  2. Boot from usb drive and install normally
  3. At the partitioning step I choose the first option to delete
    everything and install Ubuntu as primary OS on drive /dev/sda
  4. 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:

  1. Download the USB flash drive or CD-R image for my rEFInd boot manager.
  2. Create the relevant medium.
  3. Boot with it. With any luck, you should see the rEFInd menu pop up, which should show an option to boot Ubuntu.
  4. Boot Ubuntu.
  5. In Ubuntu, open a Terminal window and type sudo efibootmgr -v.

The efibootmgr output will show your boot entries. Here's what it shows on the computer I'm using now:

$ sudo efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000* rEFInd (direct)   HD(2,c00,114000,6e49fcaf-d054-47c9-ba69-a668c5ee8192)File(\EFI\refind\refind_x64.efi)
Boot0004* UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell  Vendor(5023b95c-db26-429b-a648-bd47664c8012,)..BO

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 the UEFI: Built-in EFI Shell entry in this example. Furthermore, the ubuntu entry's number should appear on the BootOrder 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:

sudo efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l \\EFI\\ubuntu\\shimx64.efi -L "ubuntu"

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, using bcfg from an EFI shell works even when efibootmgr in Linux doesn't work, so it may be worth trying that approach.

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