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.
Best Answer
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:
mvrefind.sh /boot/efi/EFI/refind /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT
. (Note the doubling-up ofefi
, once in lowercase and once in uppercase.) Thismvrefind.sh
command essentially does what the Boot Repair option to replace the Windows boot loader does, but with rEFInd rather than GRUB.