To start, I'm trying to boot a 14.04 live usb made with unetbootin on my own 14.04.
Sometimes it hangs here
Sometimes here
sometimes at a blank screen
and sometimes it boots just fine but hangs at some random point after about 1 minute. no further. I'm frustrated :s
It's an msi gt702pc
laptop and the usb is an 8GB sandisk cruzer blade 1.26 with bios set to legacy.
What Happened
We installed 14.04 on it long ago but we didn't use ubuntu on it for a while and forgot the root password so we thought we'd just reinstall ubuntu but we used a 13.10 iso by mistake and we chose the option "erase ubuntu and reinstall". The installer gave an error that it didn't install the bootloader (grub I suppose) and since then the grub on the laptop is useless
I cannot boot into the 13.10 installed on the laptop but I'm puzzled that I cannot boot into the live usb! I don't even have the chance to fix anything!! Would that 13.10 mistake really be the cause O.o
...Now I'm trying to boot into a windows 8 usb. I made it by formatting the usb to fat32 and using unetbootin with the windows 8.1 iso.
that's the usb with win 8.1 on it. pressing enter just makes the counter reset to 10 O.o can't boot into that either!???
...now trying with a windows 7 iso. just the same issue as win8. (In both, bios is set to legacy)
generally setting the bios to uefi just brings out that grub screen.
Right now I'm downloading this boot repair iso (that I've never tried using before) and I just hope it works or something.
...note that there's a windows 8.1 already installed and I don't want to remove it because this laptop just didn't happen to come with a cd .. just the windows installed in it. I'm trying to use the usb to fix the windows boot loader.
...so right now my current state is "Why is this happening to me"!?? It's my friend's laptop and he expects it by tomorrow and so far he's gonna kill me! Whoever saves my life before tomorrow gets a 50 point bounty XD (totally serious ;) ) ANY SUGGESTIONS. ANYTHING. condolences maybe? XD
update: was able to make a win8 bootable usb. finally! ...when I selected "uefi with csm" (and the win8 usb was plugged in) it booted into the installed windows 8. I'm not sure if it's the "uefi with csm" or the win8 usb that made booting possible but now the laptop can boot into windows through uefi.
...I did download that boot repair iso and it works seamlessly!! like a charm!! so far I have here this http://paste.ubuntu.com/11564001/ that shows some kind of info about the laptop's partitions and bootloaders' info nd things like that.
update2:
Summary for my mistakes:
(Don't do these things! Hope it helps anyone)
Don't boot the live Ubuntu usb with legacy mode when you have your previous operating systems setup on uefi mode.
Your live usb's format should be FAT32 for it to be bootable on uefi mode. (not ext4 XD)
Careful where you place your bootloader!! ...sadly I have no more advice on exactly where to place it but do your search
This Boot Repair Disk can really come in very handy if nothing is booting. Keep it around.
If Ubuntu just hangs after booting you might wanna try booting with the "nomodeset" option. (see this)
ask for help when you need it, search a lot, never freak-out, check your iso carefully before installing your system -_- and never forget your root password. -____- XD What a day! Cheers :D