Trouble installing on inspiron 11-3168

Question

Trying to install on my newly acquired DELL 11-3168 with no avail.

With fdsik -l I see heaps of partitions, but these have me stumped..

Device         Boot    Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1 *        2048 52891647 52889600 25.2G 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p2      52893694 61069311  8175618  3.9G  5 Extended
/dev/mmcblk0p5      52893696 61069311  8175616  3.9G 82 Linux swap / Solaris

and apparently the boot partition is correct and has been written to where it should be. However:

Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot1: 4 MiB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/mmcblk0boot0: 4 MiB, 4194304 bytes, 8192 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes


Disk /dev/sda: 14.9 GiB, 16008609792 bytes, 31266816 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

What is sda? Not sure what this is doing here and how these boot partitions are impacting things... that they are impacting is without a doubt as the machine won't boot from HDD - no boot drive found..

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How can I nuke all this and just go back to a single drive and couple of partitions? Would writing a new partition table on /dev/sda work?

Answer 1

thanks for the response peeps!

This, as with many things, turned out to be a simple fix... There is a setting in the BIOS for 'FastBoot' that was nuking things, with Fastboot turned off I could UEFI install the distro without any issues...

For future reference if anyone else stumbles on this:

BIOS Settings - Fastboot OFF, UEFI Mode ON, Secure Boot OFF

This worked for me, UEFI formatted live USB.