Things rapidly spiralling from bad to worse on this disasterous Dell Inspiron 15 5577.
First, Windows got corrupted, twice, so I decided to install Ubuntu. Didn't have a USB handy and it doesn't work on SD cards, so I went to buy a thumb drive quickly. I got a 64Gb drive which is bigger than it wants, possibly a problem? I had installed Windows media on the thing, and it created a 32 Gb partition. To do this I wiped out everythign and used Startup Disk Creator to write the partition onto the drive.
First tried to UEFI and secure boot on, since the ubuntu utlity has been creating UEFI drives for some time (I thought). BIOS did let me switch boot order, and the drive showed up with Ubuntu 18. That didn't work, so I re-installed with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That did not work either. It crashes during boot, the logo freezes in the splash screen.
I switched off secure boot. Then based on the following discussion I switched off UEFI, even though I thought the drive is UEFI.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2382295
The booting and BIOS are getting slower all the time, and I am going to try to reset to factory defaults. I don't understand how the BIOS can get slow -- it should not be doing anything. It seems to be waiting for non-existent drives.
The other posting mentioned "fastboot" but I cannot find that option anywhere.
The first time it booted off the UEFI USB drive but crashed. Now, I can't even get BIOS to find the USB drive so I can try to boot off it.
I would love to get to the point again where it fires up the grub menu, but now I'm not even getting to that point.
Any idea what is going wrong?
0 Answers