| From: Stewart C. Russell <scruss@gmail.com> | Revos have an EFI bios, right? No, this is pretty old. | I used to get this all the time on my | Samsung Chronos, until I blew away the dual-boot and put it back into | legacy (aka "working") BIOS mode. Useful lore. | Boot-Repair <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair> on a | bootable USB stick will likely fix it. OK. I'm partway into getting a USB stick for Ubuntu 14.04.3. Negative observation four: ubuntu mirrors are inconsistent. <http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04.3/> and <http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/14.04.3/> are not the same as <http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-cdimages/14.04.3/release/> but it is close enough to be confusing. ubuntu-14.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso is in the first two but not the last. (I usually go to a separate mirror for the .iso and the SHA256SUM) Negative observation five++: although the .iso is only 1G, the Ubuntu Startup Disk Creator said my 4G USB stick was too small. It even said that my 8G stick was too small until I tried enough times and ways. And then, after perhaps 10 minutes, it asked for a password to install the bootloader (why is that more special than formatting the drive?) and then said that it failed to install the bootloader. Probably this 5 year old bug: <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/usb-creator/+bug/859539> You can see from #6 that I hit this before. The virtually secret log ~/.cache/usb-creator.log isn't helpful. Seems to be some kind of dbus timeout. the logfile seems to never be emptied! I have entries from 2013! So I invoked usb-creator-gtk from an xterm, with secret flag --alow-system-internal Now it won't work because the USB partition /dev/sdb1 is mounted. I cannot unmount it with sudo umount /dev/sdb1. Ejecting makes it unavailable. dd'ing a couple of megs of zeros to /dev/sdb leaves it unperturbed. The final trick was to format the USB drive with the desktop's formatter and not have usb-creator-gtk do the formatting. My guess is that there was some race between useb-creator-gtk and "the desktop". This stick is now nicely bootable. I booted it, installed boot-repair on the stick (why isn't this part of Ubuntu?), and ran it. The result worked -- I could boot Ubuntu 14.04 from the hard drive! The Grub menu was a mess but it was correct. I fixed that from within the installed system. Negative observation 6: The updated-to-14.04 system had some ugly console messages during booting and they didn't go away. Putting one into google, I got a hit in German and guessed what it meant. Apparently HAL isn't used any longer and one of its udev rules (70-something) didn't follow modern standards. The cure was to "apt-get remove hal". How would a normal user figure this out? | Under certain circumstances, | Windows updates will routinely destroy grub, so keep this stick handy. I booted Ubuntu 12.04 after Win 7 updates. So that isn't a good excuse this time.