Installing Ubuntu 16.04

Ubuntu logoRecently, I had my trusty Z930 upgraded to a shiny new 500GB disk (instead of the 128GB disk it used to have, divided over 2 OSes…).
Of course, the disk was completely empty. Plug in an Ubuntu 16.04 live USB stick, click install, and everything’s fine? Nope…. start_image() returned not found plus a bunch of EFI startup files that weren’t, apparently, found.

There was a problem with EFI. And there are tons of solutions out there. The following quoted solution ended up working for me (found at https://askubuntu.com/questions/597052/can-not-boot-anymore-after-a-boot-repair). Begin quote:

  • Boot the system from live USB stick and mount the harddisk, e.g.
    sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
  • After checking the content of my directory with the ls command, I found out that /EFI/Boot was already there. So I made a backup of bootx64.efi by typing
    sudo mv /mnt/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi /mnt/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi.backup
  • Then I copied all the content of the /mnt/EFI/ubuntu into /mnt/EFI/Boot with the following command line:
    sudo cp /mnt/EFI/ubuntu/* /mnt/EFI/Boot
  • Finally, I renamed the file grubx64.efi to bootx64.efi by typing
    sudo mv /mnt/EFI/Boot/grubx64.efi /mnt/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi

Lessons learned: if fighting with the boot process, make sure to have an extra computer to google solutions. It’s unbelievably frustrating if every attempt to fix the problem means you lose all the info you’ve gathered so far and have to find everything afresh.

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