Dual booting Ubuntu with Windows 10, Ubuntu is installed but cannot boot into it

Question

I had windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.04 earlier on two separate partitions. Recently, I've installed an SSD on my laptop (in place of the ODD). I've formatted the partition containing Ubuntu and removed its entry from the BIOS menu using easyBCD. My idea was to install Ubuntu on the SSD itself.

tl;dr Version of this post: no short version, I desperately need this up and running so please read through.

Here's what I did: Set up the SSD first, initialized it from the disk management using GPT. Created two partitions U and Z roughly of the same size. Made a bootable USB and installed the OS (Ubuntu) on sdb2 with mount point on "/" and boot loader location as sdb.

Here's what happened: Ubuntu was successfully installed and I was prompted to restart to finish the setup. So I did, but after the restart there was a screen with a bunch of weird lines and then the grub2 screen which I couldn't get past because I got errors like failed to load kernel, failed to read sector 0x0 and some other location (0xf23...) which I think has something to do with the grub location..?

So I went into the boot menu in BIOS and noticed that the Ubuntu was showing up on the HDD instead of the SSD. I am pretty sure there's only Windows on HDD and that Ubuntu was "successfully installed" on the SSD. I don't understand why I keep getting into the grub2 screen, the OS never loaded although I know it's sitting there.

After searching on Google for quite some time, I tried a couple of solutions like running Boot-Repair (live DVD/USB), mounting the sdb using Ubuntu live DVD/USB and trying to install GRUB in that location. So here's the output.

And here's the BIOS Info Script and here's the error when I tried to install GRUB.

The GParted output shows msftdata in the Flags section for sdb2 and sdb3 (this one is empty), both have the same name "Basic data partition" and there's a weird one, /dev/sdb1 is Named Microsoft reserved partition (is this because I used the disk management tool?)

I don't understand how I am supposed to get this running, someone please guide me through what needs to be done.

PS: I tried to install Ubuntu after removing my HDD which didn't work, I tried choosing boot loader location as sda which also did not work.

Answer 1

I was able to solve this with a manual hardware work around.

I detached the harddisk with windows before installing Ubuntu using a live USB on the SDD.

Now the BIOS was able to detect both OS but the order was set to Windows first. So I had to reinstall GRUB so that GRUB loader is loaded first.

I think the main reason for the sector errors was because the ODD and HDD slots on the machine have different buses at different speeds. I do not have proof for this; it is just an intuition.

In case someone wants to dual boot and seem to face similar problem one possible easy solution is to remove the HDD with the OS before installing a new one in other disks. (Do not forget to back up your data).