I wiped my hard drive of windows and ubuntu 16.04

[rusty377]

Now that I have a clean disk I cannot install 1710 I get a grub loader error and cannot select any other sda or sda1. Help please! Do I have to have a system of some form to load iso disk? what might I do if I am required to have an existing system to load?

[TheFu]

The ISO needs to be on some media that the computer knows how to boot. This is usually a CDROM/DVD or Flash USB drive. The target disk cannot be in-use already.

Or am I misunderstanding the issue?

[oldos2er]

If you formatted the two OSes you had installed (assuming here) you lost part of grub which is why your system won't boot.

Please clarify your hardware specs, and the hardware's current state. (Assuming again) if you have access to another computer you can create an Ubuntu live medium from there.

[rusty377]

I have a Dell laptop with cd-drive but it has this weird thing of a "single boot" option. I tried using the cd drom with some luck loading systen until it gets to grub insltall where it gives error message "faltl error" do you want to terminate this process or use several different boot options I don't uderstand. I go into settings for boot options and click both on hdd and cdrom, then go to f12 and select onetime cd-rom to load but it fails every time. Any ideas?

I have another computer with cdrom drive and can create media DVD. The offending machine is an older Dell bios version a4610 with cdrom drive as well.

If I even do the "try me" function it gets to the grub stage and fails anyway

[I] was able to get ubuntu back up by installing ubuntu 16.4.3? I do not know why? But back on ubuntu- wish it was 17.10 though. Is it possible to upgrade to 17.10 thru some mysterious way?

[TheFu]

It isn't a mystery.
* sudo apt update
* sudo apt dist-upgrade
* sudo do-release-upgrade

Make a backup BEFORE doing this so the worst situation you have is restoring to 16.04. BTW, I prefer 16.04 LTS over any 6-month-supported release. Newer isn't always better.

[rusty377]

THEFU

I tried your update stream but it did not update

[TheFu]

Any warnings or errors? Can't read minds from here, sorry. ;)
What, exactly, was the step where it happened and what, exactly, was the error?

[rusty377]

I only got fatall error....

[sudodus]

Edit: Please remember the backup as suggested by TheFu.

-o-

The following should work.

Older syntax,


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade


or (newer syntax),


sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade


Please post the whole output of each of the command lines. It will help us help you. (Otherwise we can only guess.)

-o-

Please post the output between code tags like this



output


to get output like this



output