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To start, I'm trying to boot a 14.04 live usb made with unetbootin on my own 14.04.

Sometimes it hangs here

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Sometimes here

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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

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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.

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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

1 Answer 1

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Some observations on your Boot Repair output:

  • You have no BIOS-mode boot loader in the MBR of /dev/sda, but you do have EFI-mode boot loaders for both Windows and Ubuntu in the EFI System Partition (ESP) on that disk. This indicates EFI-mode installations of both Windows and Ubuntu.
  • Your /dev/sdb has a BIOS-mode copy of GRUB in its MBR and uses the older MBR partition table. This indicates that Ubuntu was installed to it in BIOS mode at some point. Note that mixing EFI-mode and BIOS-mode OS installations is usually pretty awkward. It's also unclear whether the EFI-mode or BIOS-mode Ubuntu install was more recent.
  • It's not clear if you've got a working Ubuntu installation on /dev/sdb1. There are some critical files on that partition, but Boot Repair has not identified some others. Maybe that's a Boot Repair slip-up, or maybe they're absent.
  • Your GUID Partition Table's (GPT's) protective MBR on /dev/sda has an end sector of 4,294,967,295. This is as large as is theoretically possible, and is roughly four times as big as your disk can handle. The Boot Repair output comments on this, on line 108: /dev/sda1 ends after the last sector of /dev/sda. I would expect that most tools would be OK with this, but it's entirely possible that something (GRUB, perhaps) is not.

I recommend you deal with the final point first. You should be able to do this from your Ubuntu emergency disc by using gdisk:

  1. Open a Terminal window.
  2. Launch gdisk on the disk by typing sudo gdisk /dev/sda.
  3. Type p to view your partitions and verify that they're sensible. If not, your disk device filenames might have changed or gdisk might have a problem with your malformed protective MBR, so you should quit.
  4. Type x to enter the experts' menu.
  5. Type n to create a new protective MBR.
  6. Type p to view your partitions again to ensure you haven't typed an incorrect command and wiped them out accidentally.
  7. Type w to save your changes. Respond affirmatively when gdisk asks for confirmation.

At this point, you might be able to boot normally, but I make no promises of that. If you continue to have problems, I have two suggestions:

  • Try running Boot Repair again. It might do better once the protective MBR has been repaired.
  • Download the USB flash drive or CD-R version of my rEFInd boot manager and prepare a medium with it. Boot to it. It should enable you to boot Windows, and if the Ubuntu install on /dev/sdb1 is complete, rEFInd should enable you to boot it, too. (Note that rEFInd might show multiple Linux/Ubuntu options. One should launch GRUB, and the others, if present, should launch Linux kernels. The kernels are more likely to work than the GRUB entry.) If this gets Ubuntu booting, you can either install rEFInd using its Debian package or PPA or you can try installing GRUB manually.

If neither Boot Repair nor rEFInd lets you boot, I recommend you try re-installing at this point. If you have no data on /dev/sdb, I recommend you delete its partitions, convert it from MBR to GPT, and install in EFI mode. See my Web page on EFI-mode Linux installations for details on how to do this. As I noted earlier, mixing EFI-mode and BIOS-mode installs is tricky at best, and given that your EFI-mode Windows installation is working, that makes it easiest to redo the Ubuntu installation in EFI mode rather than convert Windows to a BIOS-mode boot. If you have important user data on /dev/sdb, I still recommend you do as I've just described, but back up your data first.

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  • okay allow me to make sure; will these operations on /dev/sda affect the windows installation on it in any way??
    – 842Mono
    Jun 4, 2015 at 15:27
  • The shouldn't, but I can't guarantee that. Any time you write something to a disk, especially a low-level data structure, there's a chance for things to go horribly wrong.
    – Rod Smith
    Jun 4, 2015 at 15:53
  • well I didn't notice that but now I do .. the Ubuntu live usb is not a boot option in uefi. I just can't find it. I'm trying now many methods to deal with that but I still haven't
    – 842Mono
    Jun 4, 2015 at 16:10
  • okay I fixed that. my usb was formatted to ext4 not fat32 -_- ..but now I have another problem; the ubuntu logo just keeps on loading and doesn't let me in :s
    – 842Mono
    Jun 4, 2015 at 17:20
  • If you can get to a GRUB prompt, hit e to edit the entry and delete the quiet splash options. This will cause a more verbose boot, which may reveal a helpful error message. Sometimes adding nomodeset fixes video problems, if that's the cause.
    – Rod Smith
    Jun 4, 2015 at 17:25

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