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Rubi Shnol
Asked: 2015-07-10 01:54:38 +0800 CST

Booting Ubuntu 14 on Samsung laptop. rEFInd does not see the hard drive

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Good day.

I am having a really hard time trying to get Ubuntu booting on my Samsung Series 3 laptop. Ubuntu has been installed (and it's the only OS), but didn't boot.

I have been through common hints and finally came to a conclusion that there might by a problem with my firmware which I am unable to resolve.

This is the story so far:

  1. boot-repair complained about GPT. From reading this forum I concluded that since I want to use UEFI, this option does not apply to me. Here is the log, however:

boot-repair info http://paste.ubuntu.com/11842457/

  1. Tried to add EFI entry manually. Did not work. The entry vanished after reboot

  2. Read Roderick Smith's advice on creating a EFI entry manually using his rEFInd. I made a bootable USB, booted into shell and in the mapping table it displayed only a file system fs0 which is the USB itself. HDD is not present so I can't create an EFI since, frankly, shimx64.efi is not there. Really disappointing. How is that supposed to work at all?

I have spent days trying to figure out what to do. I really lack a simple and comprehensible guide on how to get Ubuntu working.

UPDATES

The EFI partition should contain a directory /EFI/ubuntu with four files: grub.cfg, grubx64.efi, MokManager.efi and shimx64.efi

How can I check that? I've mounted my EFI partition and ls'd it. It was empty.

Following Rod's advice, dmesg results are here

I think, I need to say that this laptop had preinstalled Windows 8 and so firmware might have been configured in a specific way. I decided to install Ubuntu after old HHD's death and switching to a new one.

After a fix via gdisk, Ubuntu finally appeared in rEFInd. I see file systems listed in shell other than the USB disk's one. However, I can't ls fs1 which is the EFI partition even though it was displayed as the shell started. Nor can I find shimx64.efi anywhere. Tried to boot Ubuntu from options available in rEFInd. There were two options:

  1. vmlinuz-3.16.0-43-generic which resulted in unable to mount root fs on unknown block(0,0)
  2. vmlinuz-3.16.0-43-generic.efi.signed with the same result

Screenshot

Trying to create a EFI entry bcfg boot add 4 fs1:\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi "Ubuntu" failed obviously. fs1 is my EFI partition.

Another bad thing to notice: list of available partitions after that kernel fail is empty.

If I remove the USB with rEFInd, still no boot device is present.

Here is bootinfo: http://paste.ubuntu.com/11850314/

Thanks for the answers. Especially to Rod Smith.

boot

3 Answers

  1. I have had the same problem, and you have to do this from then terminal:

          sudo apt-get install linux-amd64_ linux-efi
      sudo apt-get update
      sudo apt-get upgrade
      sudo apt-get install -f
      sudo apt-get install aptitude
      sudo aptitude linux-efi

    and it might work fine this way.

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  2. Given your configuration, rEFInd and the EFI shell should be showing you both the ESP and the Linux partition. (This assumes that the rEFInd USB drive is configured with the ext4fs driver, which the rEFInd USB images I distribute are.) Thus, my suspicion is that there's something wrong with your hard disk. Try sudo sgdisk -v /dev/sda (changing /dev/sda to your hard disk's identifier) in an Ubuntu emergency disk. This will test the partition table for errors. If you see any, report back or read my GPT fdisk documentation on repairing GPT disks.

    If there are no GPT problems, try dmesg > dmesg.txt from an emergency disk and post the output to a pastebin site. That output may provide a clue about why your disk is not visible to the firmware.

    EDIT: It looks to me as if rEFInd can't find an initial RAM disk (initrd) to match your kernel. Just to be clear, are you launching those kernels from rEFInd or from an EFI shell? I ask because the two filenames you gave (vmlinuz-3.16.0-43-generic and vmlinuz-3.16.0-43-generic.efi.signed) are identical except for the .efi.signed extension, and rEFInd includes code to keep only .efi.signed kernels if both are present, so it's odd that both would show up in the rEFInd menu. (OTOH, if you've mis-typed and the kernels vary in their version numbers, then it's perfectly understandable that there'd be two, one with and one without that extension.)

    You could look for an initrd file using a live Ubuntu disk, and check what (if any) initrd= option rEFInd is passing to the kernel by hitting F2 or Insert twice when you launch the kernel. This procedure will open a text editor that shows the options the kernel is passed, and also enable you to edit those options.

    At this point, though, it might be easier to re-install Ubuntu. Unless I misunderstand, this is a fresh installation, so you've got no valuable user data on the system. With the active 0xEE protective partition now inactive, a fresh installation is likely to correct whatever additional problem you've been having.

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  3. Best Answer

    So my suspicion about emptiness of the EFI partition was not without reason. Ubuntu has not been installed fully because laptop went down due to overheating. I reinstalled it and it seems to be booting now.

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