16.04 Installation of GRUB fails,

[badcomputerkarma]

Hi all
I have a brand new laptop with no OS on it and tried to install Ubuntu Mate 16.04.
When installation was nearly finished (at least it seemed so) it told me that GRUB could not be installed.
I then started from live CD and tried to install GRUB2 with
{sudo apt-get install linux-signed-generic grub-efi-amd64-signed shim-signed}
and although cable-connected to the internet it told me
E: Package linux-signed-generic not found
E: package grub-efi-amd64-signed not found
E: package shim-signed not found

then - following the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info
I ran boot-info.
Here is the report-link: http://paste2.org/7Z9NEUIk

Somewhere in between I also tried to run boot-repair. It said it had repaired it, but it didn´t work.
Well - obviously, since there is no Grub to repair...
Happy for any help and suggestions
Cheers
Yours
badcomputerkarma

[yancek]

{sudo apt-get install linux-signed-generic grub-efi-amd64-signed shim-signed}

That only works with an EFI install which absolutely requires a separate EFI partition which you do not have. Did you want to do an EFI install or an MBR install?
According to boot repair, you are using a 32bit iso (Ubuntu-MATE 16.04 LTS i386) and I'm not sure that it is possible to use EFI with 32bit. If so it is more difficult. Which installation type option did you select? It appears you have used encryption with a separate boot partition.

[oldfred]

You have installed in the well known but 35 year old BIOS with MBR partitioning.
New systems use the newer UEFI with gpt partitioning.

You can stay with MBR/BIOS, but if you want to change now is the time.

Script says this:
SecureBoot maybe enabled.

New UEFI systems have three ways to boot, and how you boot installer is then how it installs. But how you boot the install or default settings in UEFI may not match the way you installed.
You can have UEFI with SecureBoot on, Standard UEFI and CSM.
CSM - UEFI Compatibility Support Module (CSM), which emulates a BIOS mode
Secure boot may just be called "Windows" and "Other" in UEFI.

You might try turning Secure boot off in UEFI and see if grub then installs. Make sure in Boot-Repair you include separate /boot and LVM options.

You can also use gpt partitioning with BIOS boot. I converted to using gpt with my old BIOS system about 6 years ago. With BIOS you need a tiny bios_grub partition. But with UEFI you need the ESP - efi system partition. Even before I knew I was eventually going to get a new UEFI system, I started adding both the ESP & bios_grub to all new drives and even large flash drives. Then I would not have to totally refomat drive to add ESP as UEFI suggests it be first or at least near beginning of drive.

With LVM and encryption you need to learn about those. I do not know either.
And since not standard partitioning, and repairs of encrypted partitions can be very difficult extremely good backup plans are required.

GPT Advantages (older but still valid) see post#2 by srs5694:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1457901
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GUID_Partition_Table#Advantages_of_GPT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface
http://askubuntu.com/questions/629470/gpt-vs-mbr-why-not-mbr
UEFI Advantages
http://askubuntu.com/questions/647303/uefi-or-legacy-which-is-advised-and-why/647604#647604
http://askubuntu.com/questions/446968/legacy-vs-uefi-help

[Dennis N]

If you used the default boot loader location (sda) during installation it wouldn't install grub, since you don't seem to have a valid partition table on that disk:

See: Line 195+

Model: ATA WDC WD5000LPVX-0 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 500GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: unknown


Maybe you should partition that disk?

[badcomputerkarma]

Hi
thanks for all your hints and helpful suggestions!
I had to drop the whole UEFI-topic, because as long as I had the UEFI-Option enabled in the BIOS-settings I constantly got the famous "insert proper boot device"-answer. The first time the computer booted from DVD was when I had disabled UEFI. Heaven knows why...

However - I have reinstalled Mate. This time I have dropped the encryption-Option and defined my own arrangement of partitions, including a boot-Partition for Grub. Now it works!!!
Almost...
Booting is surprisingly slow, given that Mate is quite small and it is booting on a SSD-Disk. Screen is also flickering a bit. But the Problem is that now it always gets stuck when shutting down.
Is this possibly a consequence of unelegant partitioning?
Thanks again
yours
badcomputerkarma

[oldfred]

More likely some boot parameter is required for your system.
And then some driver cannot correctly load & has to time out.

What brand/model system? Also correct video mode often solves issues. What video card/chip?

I do not normally suggest a Linux /boot partition but if UEFI you do need the ESP - efi system partition, or if gpt and still booting in BIOS, a bios_grub partition.

May be best to see details, but your issues may be past grub booting to grub menu and into kernel loading:
Post the link to the Create BootInfo summary report. Is part of Boot-Repair:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info

[badcomputerkarma]

Hello again
after some days I found the time to come back to this. I am sorry for being too stupid, but somehow I can't make much of the last response.
As I said UEFI didn't work at all. So I used BIOS.
No idea whether this was a good idea, I used my ssd-Drive like this:

/0/6/0.0.0 /dev/sdb disk 240GB Kingston SHPM228
/0/6/0.0.0/1 /dev/sdb1 volume 476MiB Linux filesystem partition #--> marked as boot partition
/0/6/0.0.0/2 /dev/sdb2 volume 18GiB EXT4-Laufwerk #--> reserved for some later install of something
/0/6/0.0.0/3 /dev/sdb3 volume 18GiB Linux filesystem partition #--> mate system
/0/6/0.0.0/4 /dev/sdb4 volume 186GiB Extended partition #--> storage
/0/6/0.0.0/4/5 /dev/sdb5 volume 18GiB Linux swap / Solaris partition #--> swap
/0/6/0.0.0/4/6 /dev/sdb6 volume 167GiB Linux filesystem partition #--> reserve
I have checked where Grub was installed:
#for d in $(sed -ne 's/^.*\(sd.*\)/\1/p' /proc/partitions);do sudo hexdump -v -s 0x80 -n 2 -e '"'$d' ID: " 2/1 "%x" "\n"' /dev/$d;done
sda ID: 00
sdb ID: 020
sdb1 ID: 00
sdb2 ID: 00
sdb3 ID: 00
sdb4 ID: 00
sdb5 ID: 00
sdb6 ID: 00

if I interpret this right then I had planned to have it installed in sdb1 but it didn't. But all the same after I had used this partition table booting suddenly worked.

You ask for the system. Here is what #lshw -short does:

H/W-Pfad Gerät Klasse Beschreibung
================================================== =====
system N350DW (Not Applicable)
/0 bus N350DW
/0/0 memory 64KiB BIOS
/0/18 memory 128KiB L1 Cache
/0/19 memory 128KiB L1 Cache
/0/1a memory 1MiB L2 Cache
/0/1b memory 8MiB L3 Cache
/0/1c processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700T CPU @ 2.80GHz
/0/1c/3.1 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.2 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.3 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.4 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.5 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.6 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.7 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.8 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.9 processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.a processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.b processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.c processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.d processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.e processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.f processor Logische CPU
/0/1c/3.10 processor Logische CPU
/0/1d memory 4GiB Systemspeicher
/0/1d/0 memory 4GiB SODIMM DDR3 Synchron 1867 MHz (0,5 ns)
/0/1d/1 memory Project-Id-Version: lshwReport-Msgid-Bugs-To: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>POT-Creation-Date: 2009-10
/0/1 processor
/0/1/3.1 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.2 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.3 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.4 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.5 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.6 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.7 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.8 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.9 processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.a processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.b processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.c processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.d processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.e processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.f processor Logische CPU
/0/1/3.10 processor Logische CPU
/0/2 processor
/0/2/3.1 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.2 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.3 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.4 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.5 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.6 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.7 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.8 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.9 processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.a processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.b processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.c processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.d processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.e processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.f processor Logische CPU
/0/2/3.10 processor Logische CPU
/0/3 processor
/0/3/3.1 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.2 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.3 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.4 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.5 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.6 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.7 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.8 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.9 processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.a processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.b processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.c processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.d processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.e processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.f processor Logische CPU
/0/3/3.10 processor Logische CPU
/0/100 bridge Sky Lake Host Bridge/DRAM Registers
/0/100/2 display Sky Lake Integrated Graphics
/0/100/14 bus Sunrise Point-H USB 3.0 xHCI Controller
/0/100/14/0 usb2 bus xHCI Host Controller
/0/100/14/1 usb1 bus xHCI Host Controller
/0/100/14/1/6 generic EMV Smartcard Reader
/0/100/14/1/9 communication Bluetooth-Schnittstelle
/0/100/14/1/b multimedia Chicony USB 2.0 Camera
/0/100/14/1/c generic EgisTec_ES603
/0/100/16 communication Sunrise Point-H CSME HECI #1
/0/100/17 storage Sunrise Point-H SATA controller [AHCI mode]
/0/100/1c bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #3
/0/100/1c/0 wlp1s0 network QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter
/0/100/1c.3 bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #4
/0/100/1c.3/0 generic RTS5229 PCI Express Card Reader
/0/100/1c.5 bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #6
/0/100/1d bridge Sunrise Point-H PCI Express Root Port #13
/0/100/1d/0 storage Kingston Technologies
/0/100/1f bridge Sunrise Point-H LPC Controller
/0/100/1f.2 memory Memory controller
/0/100/1f.3 multimedia Sunrise Point-H HD Audio
/0/100/1f.4 bus Sunrise Point-H SMBus
/0/100/1f.6 enp0s31f6 network Ethernet Connection (2) I219-V

Is this of any value? I am a bit surprised by all the logicla CPUs. Is that normal?
Here is the bootinfo-link:
http://paste2.org/BNjZ8C5L

Yours
badcomputerkarma

[oldfred]

Usually better not to use the separate /boot partition for most desktop installs. It is usually used with the LVM with full drive encryption install option.

The extended partition is just a container for all the logical partitions.

You can install Ubuntu in BIOS boot mode with gpt partitioning. And you do not have the extended & logical partition issues.

I converted to gpt before UEFI was standard. And then when I thought I might move a drive to a new UEFI system, I started adding both the ESP - efi system partition for UEFI boot and the bios_grub partition for BIOS boot to all new or totally reformatted drives. Then I could easily change boot modes, if desired.

GPT Advantages (older but still valid) see post#2 by srs5694:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1457901
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GUID_Partition_Table#Advantages_of_GPT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

Part of boot process often is checking other drives/partitions. But it looks like your sda is blank or unpartitioned, unformatted.
sda may have broken partition table.

That may be part of boot issue.
Post this:

systemd-analyze blame
systemd-analyze critical-chain

Do you have video card, or are just using Intel's video?

[badcomputerkarma]

Hello again
no video card.

[QUOTE]#systemd-analyze critical chain
gives
graphical.target @10.109s
└─multi-user.target @10.091s
└─ntp.service @10.005s +85ms
└─network-online.target @9.990s
└─NetworkManager-wait-online.service @1.817s +8.172s
└─NetworkManager.service @1.700s +95ms
└─dbus.service @1.678s
└─basic.target @1.677s
└─sockets.target @1.676s
└─snapd.socket @1.670s +616us
└─sysinit.target @1.669s
└─apparmor.service @535ms +1.113s
└─local-fs.target @533ms
└─home.mount @518ms +11ms
└─systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-422bc606\x2d6f8c\x2d4302\x2d9230\x2d04e400a98d2b.s ervice @502ms +15ms
└─dev-disk-by\x2duuid-422bc606\x2d6f8c\x2d4302\x2d9230\x2d04e400a98d2b.d evice @488ms
[/code]~


#systemd-analyze blame gives
8.172s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
1.113s apparmor.service
1.086s plymouth-read-write.service
491ms upower.service
429ms systemd-rfkill.service
403ms dev-sdb2.device
402ms gpu-manager.service
393ms systemd-backlight@backlight:intel_backlight.service
235ms snapd.refresh.service
215ms apt-daily.service
136ms accounts-daemon.service
135ms ModemManager.service
121ms networking.service
106ms systemd-logind.service
102ms bluetooth.service
95ms NetworkManager.service
93ms avahi-daemon.service
90ms grub-common.service
88ms udisks2.service
85ms ntp.service
81ms wpa_supplicant.service
76ms ondemand.service
59ms irqbalance.service
55ms speech-dispatcher.service
47ms apport.service
45ms console-setup.service
39ms lightdm.service
36ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
34ms keyboard-setup.service
28ms systemd-journald.service
28ms systemd-udevd.service
23ms pppd-dns.service
20ms systemd-modules-load.service
19ms systemd-journal-flush.service
17ms plymouth-start.service
16ms user@1000.service
16ms boot.mount
15ms systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-422bc606\x2d6f8c\x2d4302\x2d9230\x2d04e400a98d2b.s ervice
14ms alsa-restore.service
13ms hddtemp.service
12ms resolvconf.service
11ms polkitd.service
11ms home.mount
10ms appgrid.service
9ms systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-9cfab32c\x2d7468\x2d4ea1\x2db197\x2d7d2de8d3a3ac.s ervice
9ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service
9ms systemd-user-sessions.service
8ms sys-kernel-debug.mount
7ms dev-hugepages.mount
7ms dev-mqueue.mount
6ms rsyslog.service
6ms ufw.service
6ms rtkit-daemon.service
6ms kmod-static-nodes.service
6ms systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service
5ms systemd-update-utmp-runlevel.service
5ms systemd-sysctl.service
4ms systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service
4ms ureadahead-stop.service
4ms systemd-remount-fs.service
4ms dev-disk-by\x2duuid-ae8be6d9\x2d0c9c\x2d402d\x2db716\x2dfc7635923079.s wap
3ms systemd-update-utmp.service
2ms systemd-random-seed.service
2ms rc-local.service
1ms sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount
1ms setvtrgb.service
1ms plymouth-quit-wait.service
616us snapd.socket
what does that tell us?

Yours
badcomputerkarma

[oldfred]

The longest is only 8 sec and that is network.
Are you using Wired or Wireless.

And have you connected with wired to see difference, if any?

My system shows similar info

fred@Asusz97:~$ systemd-analyze blame
8.328s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
4.289s apt-daily.service
2.194s systemd-fsck@dev-disk-by\x2duuid-a0c1c99f\x2d0f09\x2d4787\x2da7

[badcomputerkarma]

Hi oldfred

this was wireless. I just checked wired and network manager even takes 9 seconds, so...
However - I took your advice that an unformatted drive somewhere in the system might be part of the boot issue.
So I have formatted everything and then I ran boot-repair and Grub was cleaned and reinstalled.
It does boot now showing the grub dialogue. And it does so fairly quickly. That's good!
Still it won't shut down correctly and I found other smaller issues - e.g. the power management doesn't work properly.
I suggest I declare the grub and boot issue as solved and see whether the shutdown process runs better when I have sorted the other issues out. Possibly there is some background process that hinders shutdown...
Maybe then I start another shutdown-thread in the general questions-forum.
Thanks a lot for your time and answers!

Yours
badcomputerkarma

[oldfred]

Since backlight was mentioned I have seen this.
Some other boot options
acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor


Dell mini 10012 keyboard backlight service mask
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2332063

I have seen threads with shutdown issues. Best to post a new thread with that in title. I have not followed those issues, but someone may know details.