Dell Inspiron N4110 8GB RAM Intel i7-2640M installing Edubuntu Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS.
Installation media boots fine and I can Try Ubuntu with no issues, and the interactive install appears to complete successfully, but on restart Ubuntu fails to boot on the hard drive. There was a Windows 10 install at one point and Dell diagnostics point to no drive issues. Boot-Repair pastebin below.
no UEFI is available on this model, BIOS is legacy only. No known BIOS settings causing issues (no secureboot since no UEFI mode, no security settings set generally etc). Let me know if I missed anything, thank you for your help!
https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/FWD68Bk8MC/
No, I don’t think that you missed anything
The boot-repair report looks OK
Did you try the recommended repair?
I did, no success unfortunately. I’ll do it again though and generate a pastebin.
No, don’t bother yet - I have an unusual idea, which has worked occasionally in the past.
Your PC - How old is it?
Dell warranty expired in 2013 so probably manufactured 2012
Ah, around 12 years old.
A long time ago, pre UEFI, Ubuntu was installed on one partition without the BIOS Boot partition.
Your disk is currently GPT (line 74 of the report) and you’ll need to change it to msdos
This is an old-fashioned installation with only one partition (without a BIOS Boot partition):-
Remove all disks – only the target disk available
Boot into a “Try Ubuntu” live session in Legacy mode
Open terminal and check boot mode
[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo "UEFI" || echo "Legacy"
Open Gparted > Devices > Create a msdos partition table on the target disk.
Open the installer
Installation type = Manual Installation (Something Else)
Select free space and click the + sign
Create one Primary partition with Ext4 file system and Mount point = / (system root)
Install Grub bootloader to device not to a partition (e.g sda not sda1)
(i.e. do not let the installer “Erase Disk and Install”)
If you see a message/warning about ESP not found, ignore it and continue the installation.
The installer will show that only one partition is to be created and formatted.
Continue the installation
Let’s see if Lady luck is on our side - fingers crossed
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This appears to have done the trick! I’m booting into Edubuntu now. Thanks so much for your help!