UEFI Troubles, internal drive won't boot

Support & Help Requests
#1

My laptop HDD took a dump on me while i was attempting to copy it to a new drive due to issues that had been occurring. Halfway through the copy the source drive completely failed. Decided on MATE for the OS except I knew nothing about this UEFI at all and freaking erased it during the install. now i can only boot live because the laptop wont boot the internal drive at all. Any help with either getting the UEFI back or a way to boot up internal drive without it, thanks in advance!

#2

Please clarify something for us - what do you want to do exactly?

  • Recover your data
  • Install Ubuntu MATE
#3

Sorry for mot being more clear. I have installed MATE but before doing so I formated the whole drive as one partition giving up on my old files. I am having trouble booting the drive having removed the partitions that I now assume had the UEFI installed on it. Not looking for recovery of failed drive right now. new drive installed and i want laptop to be dedicated MATE machine now.

Seems like the system is expecting to load the UEFI but not finding the files. tried installing with different settings, even made a partition dedicated for the bootloader but nothing works. Keeps telling me there’s nothing to load.

#4

During the partitioning step of the installer, when it proposes to “erase disk and install Ubuntu MATE”, you should pick that if you don’t need to have a specific partition layout.

If you want a specific layout you should first try and disable UEFI in your BIOS, see if you have a “legacy” mode and disable “secure boot”.

If you wanna stick with UEFI use something like the following partition layout (assuming 4Gigs of RAM):

/         ext4 40GB
          swap 4GB
/boot/efi ESP  250MB (EFI System Partition)
/home     ext4 <all remaining space>
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#5

See the UEFI section in the partition guide too!:

#6

Erase disk and install worked like a charm, thank you so much. I was attempting a specific partition set up for recovering the old windows drive so i overlooked that option and after these issues with UEFI I was worried having erased the partitions with that stuff I would have to get them back.

Thank you both for your help in this matter!

2 Likes
#7

Excellent news @Bain , I have marked @ouroumov’s answer as best answer solving your problem!. :smiley: