Hello teeming millions. For reasons I won’t go into at length, I’m installing Linux on my laptop. The installation seemed to go well. I evacuated files I wanted to keep, created an install drive on USB and changed the boot options to allow it to boot up.
I did get Linux to start, IIUC it was running from the Flash drive. I then did an install to the internal hard drive. That also seemed to go well. At some point later, I was given the option to reboot or to “continue exploring” Mint. I took the later option, connected with the wireless router in my house and studied, surfed the internet, ect. So far, so good.
This morning, I tried to boot from the hard drive and got a message stating no bootable device. So, I booted from the flash drive again. But, it seemed that this was an entirely new instance of the OS. Files I had saved to the desktop were not there. I thought perhaps I had done something wrong, so started to install to the hard drive, but found there was already an installation there. But, it wasn’t booting from that install.
Any advice? I’m fairly tech saavy, but also new to Linux. Stack overflow wasn’t much help. The hits I got were for similar, but not quite the exact issue.
Try holding down whatever is the appropriate key when you power on the computer to make it list all the storage devices off which it can boot, and select the hard disk explicitly. And/or enter the BIOS setup menu, look for the boot options, and make sure the disk in question is on the list of boot devices.
That was my first thought. But, I had to change the BIOS boot options in order to boot from the USB flash drive. Shouldn’t the BIOS, upon finding the USB socket empty, attempt to boot from the hard drive? Also, if I change this and it won’t boot from the HD, and I’ve removed the option for USB booting . . . bad times, neh?
Try reinstalling it again, apparently it didn’t set up the bootloader correctly. The installer will detect your previous attempt, just tell it to erase that one and install fresh.
Yuk, I’m on about the fourth install now. I did a scan of the media in order to determine if there were any corrupted or damaged files, I found that there was one bad file. Soooo, I reformatted and imaged the install drive and scanned it again (no bad files this time). But, post-installation, the behavior is the same. Basically, Mint seems to work fine, but only after booting from the flash drive. It won’t boot without the drive inserted. Also, each boot creates a blank slate, nothing saved to desktop is there. Despite this, examining the drive partitions, there is a Mint install on the hard drive.
The blank slate after USB boot is normal behaviour and irrelevant. You should not need the drive post installation.
Have you verified that your hard disk is selected and enabled as the default boot device in the BIOS configuration?
Really worst case, does only an installed Linux Mint not boot, or does the problem also occur with Fedora, Ubuntu, PC-BSD, ie independent of OS and boot loader?
ETA please disable any weird “secure boot” options in the BIOS
Well, you might think that’s logical, but in my experience, it doesn’t always work that way. Try explicitly changing away from USB boot back to hard drive and see if that makes it work. You can always go back in to BIOS and change it back to USB, so it can’t hurt to try that.
It sounds to me like something is going south when Linux installs its boot loader. Grub either didn’t install or something went south during Grub’s installation.
There are some tools like SuperGrub and RescaTux that might come in handy. I’ve used those to get me out of issues I’ve had with dual-boot systems. If the only thing that’s screwed up is the boot loader, these can fix it. These tools also might give you a better idea of what exactly is going on with your system and why the boot loader isn’t working properly.
Is your laptop using UEFI or MBR to boot? Things can get hosed if the computer is using one and the operating systems are trying to use the other. The locations for this setting vary, but somewhere in the BIOS you’ll typically find something labeled Boot Mode or something similar. In some BIOS setups, MBR is called Legacy, and the option in the BIOS also might be called Legacy Boot or Legacy Boot Mode with the option to enable it for MBR or disable it for UEFI (that might not be obvious from the BIOS screen).
If you are using UEFI, make sure that you are using the 64 bit version of Mint. Like most versions of Linux, Mint is available in both a 32 bit and 64 bit version.
Thanks again for input. UEFI is the default boot, I didn’t see the option for MBR (but, apparently, that’s because it is called legacy on my system). I can confirm that it is a 64 bit install, not 32. Hmm, you know, I thought changing around the boot priority could leave me unable to boot at all, but now that I think about it, I could always go back into the BIOS menu and change it back, since that’s accessed before booting is finished anyway. I should have realized that earlier.
Still no dice. Got a reddit thread up, too. (Reddit user name is Saint_Razz). Question is too vague for Github. For now I’m kind of busy studying Javascript, so it’s not super high priority, especially since my studies are all saved online and I still have desktop for anything requiring local storage. But, I’d eventually like to get this worked out. Getting some hands-on Linux xp is on my list, after HTML, CSS, PHP, and JS.
An interesting observation from that page: there’s a step to disable some possible default options intended to speed up Windows but may not be compatible with Linux:
If these were turned on in the UEFI and you didn’t know to turn them off, it may affect bootability or usability.