I started my FOSS journey last fall, got a desktop set up on mint and Ubuntu, then left for 3 1/2 months to Arizona. Picked up a laptop at a pawnshop, and installed Mint on it and have been testing/ playing since January. I am now back home in Minnesota, and have a problem. There have been a few times when I have had to force shut down the system, but it always restarted. Yesterday I got the following message. I’m also including the info on the Acer. I have tried booting to the USB. Any ideas?
Hey @patpsalm4610!
The best way will be to boot via Live USB and install the Boot Repair application. This will look into the troubles of your boot sectors and apply the necessary repairs. That’s the first step to go through.
You can find some great tips here:
If that produces any errors, you might want to do a drive check to repair anything that might be wrong.
To do that, once you boot up from the Live USB, open up Disks, select your drive and then do a check and repair on your drive. The outlook of the app should look something like the screenshot below:
Thanks Vasileios! I was finally able to boot from the live USB. Tried to run the boat repair, but got an error that it wouldn’t run in the legacy mode. Tried to run the discs program, and that wouldn’t work either. I rebooted, and changed the boot to UEFI, restarted, and now it seems to be working again.
Not sure how it could change the bios. Are there other programs I can run to see if the hardware is working right? There have been times I need to do a hard shut down with the power button. Am I hosing the system by doing this?
Hey @patpsalm4610!
As long as your drive does not have cache-writing enabled (which in most distros, it doesn’t), you are good. Besides, when Linux detects a hard reset, it automatically checks and cleans the drive upon next boot.
Also, when you use UEFI, remember to keep the Secure Boot disabled. The reason is that in order for a Linux distro to boot (not all boot up with Secure Boot on), it has to verify the Kernel (to Microsoft’s Secure Boot). In some cases, this can leave out Kernel modules you install personally (like the WiFi).
