I'm having an interesting problem with my Ubuntu 15.04 installing on my HP Pavilion m6 laptop. I installed it from a USB stick, and the installation was successful... sort of. When I boot up the laptop, it either tells me there is no boot disk installed, or it boots to the USB drive that has the Ubuntu installation file on it when it's plugged in. What's interesting though, is that if I select the boot device, I have the option of booting from the laptop hard drive, but I also have two options for Ubuntu. If I select Ubuntu instead of the hard disk, hoozah!, it boots to Ubuntu with no problems! I'm actually using the machine to type this message right now :P
Anyways, what might be causing this to happen? I'm guessing Grub didn't install correctly, and when I use Gparted I can see 3 partitions: - /dev/sda2 which is ext4 (I assume the main operating system files are here) - /dev/sda3 which is the linux-swap - /dev/sda1 which is in fat32 and contains the boot and esp
The fat32 partition partition that contains the boot (I assume this means GRUB?) seems odd to me, because I imagine that GRUB would need to be on ext4 in order to be read as a boot option. Am I correct on this? And if so, what are some steps I could take to fix this issue?
I'm very new to Linux, this is the first time I've really gotten it installed outside of VirtualBox, so any extra instructions would be appreciated :)
why does he have two ubuntu tags? isn't the uefi entry for just the usb device? I'm curious because i have uefi and grub still just gives one ubuntu selection. Or does uefi have it's own boot menu?
I've tried that already, but the Ubuntu options don't show up in the BIOS, only the hard drive that they're on. I can only see and access them when I manually select a boot device outside of the BIOS.
You should select the 'Notebook Hard Drive' as your first boot option. After that I would highly recommend using this approach, using a live CD/USB: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
I would check to make sure that the installation didnt install the grub boot loader to your USB instead of the HDD. And that might be because the system reads it as the first boot device so that is logically where it would want to install the boot loader. There should be a way to install grub manually but I don't know it. What I would do is boot off of the USB again, then with Gparted wipe the HDD clean. Then in the bios set up the system to boot from the HDD first and USB second. If the system does not auto boot from the USB see if there is a option to select boot device during post and manually select the USB drive.
