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I am really banging my head against this one and I don't know what's going on. Due to a stupid mistake, I had to reinstall Ubuntu on this (previously functioning) system. It's set up with a 1TB SSD, 3TB HDD, and 12TB HDD. I had / and swap on the SSD, /home on the 3TB and a generic mount (/drives/hdd12t) on the 12TB.

I went to reinstall and chose all the same partitioning/mounting schemes I had before, save that I chose to overwrite the SSD and keep everything else intact. Installation proceeded without problem....until I went to boot it up.

Nothing I do (except the one thing noted below) will get the system to boot off the drive. It's something to do with the UEFI system but I have no idea what. I remove all other boot devices save the SSD, and I get the "no operating system found" message. In addition to my manual partitioning scheme, I've tried unplugging the HDDs and just using Ubuntu's default "erase this drive and install linux" method on the SSD. No love.

The only thing I have found that will let me boot the system is to flash rEFInd to a USB stick and boot off of that. When I do that it finds it no problem. I tried boot-repair, nothing (although here's the report boot-repair generated).

I tried installing rEFInd to the internal drive, with the option to write the ESP, and got no love.

What am I missing? Why can't I boot off this drive with a freshly-installed instance of Ubuntu 20.04? Why is booting rEFInd off a memory stick the only thing that works?

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  • Are you skipping the disk checking at the beginning of setup? Maybe some files did not download or copy correctly when you were making the install media. Also, have you tried going into BIOS and changing the boot order? Edit: Also, have you tried it with the new 20.10? maybe there are some fixes with your hardware in that version.
    – TheEeveeLovers
    Nov 13, 2020 at 23:43
  • I have both skipped and not skipped the disk checking. Changing the boot order doesn't help. I can remove every device from the boot order except the one I want it to boot from and it still gives me "no operating system". I haven't tried with 20.10, but the previous functioning install on this system was 20.04.
    – Luther Blissett
    Nov 13, 2020 at 23:52
  • What brand/model system? Some like HP, do not support changes from efibootmgr which grub uses to add UEFI boot entry. Others like Acer require you to set "trust" from inside UEFI. Most others just work. Have you updated UEFI and SSD firmware? Double check settings in UEFI. And some just need rEFInd to work, not sure what it does differently over grub2. My older Asus z97 system sometimes gets confused as I have installs on every drive and I use rEFInd for emergency boot, but then grub fixes do work.
    – oldfred
    Nov 14, 2020 at 3:38
  • @oldfred it's an older Lenovo tower (thinkstation D30). I haven't updated any of the firmware, perhaps I'll try that. I guess I'm just confused since I never had to deal with any of this before. Previously, I just installed ubuntu and it just worked. It's only now that I've reinstalled it that it won't boot. I'm happy to use rEFInd if that's what it takes. Is there a way to get rEFInd to work on the system or will I just have to boot off the flash drive going forward? I've done plenty of linux installs but it's always just worked so I'm a bit out of my depth with this UEFI stuff.
    – Luther Blissett
    Nov 14, 2020 at 5:51
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    You should be able to install rEFInd to a drive. I have it installed to one drive, but normally do not use it. And I have it in a couple of old flash drives that now are too small for just about anything else. If you have UEFI update, that will reset some settings, so make sure you change the ones you need. I keep a list for my systems.
    – oldfred
    Nov 14, 2020 at 14:26

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