Two days ago I turned my Dell PC on as usual. I saw the Dell logo and then a strange white screen testing my hardware. I thought maybe this is what it does from time to time, but when it finished it came with the results that all hardware if ok but there is no OS in the system so it prompted me to use any OS! That was it; I’m without OS!
The day before; I worked normally (Ubuntu 17.10) but the machine was really busy updating things and from time to time it prompted me to restart and everything went fine. The last bunch of updates prompted me that not ALL the updates can be installed due to some 3rd party issues! So, it gave me an option to “partially update”. I chose this option and it seems that this was one wrong choice. I have been using Windows my whole life and only just started using Ubuntu 3 months ago, so I didn't know what could happen.
My files are there and the machine is now nothing but a paper weight. Anyway, using the very valuable help of @lumbeezl I salvaged my files, set a USB flash stick for installing Ubuntu again. I tried hard to get it installed without formatting the system but it refused, so I had no choice but to format the HD.
I want you to help me with answering these questions:
- Is this something normal with Ubuntu? Do you just wake up one day without an OS now and then?
- What did I do wrong?
- How can I try to prevent something like this from happening again?
Any feedback you can give me would be appreciated.
PS: My Dell machine is brand new and it came with Ubuntu (16.04) pre-installed on it. All through the 3 months of its lifetime it had never managed to get a single "report" through and always giving me the same prompt:
We can’t get this report through because of some 3rd party program, remove any 3rd party programs and try again.