Cannot get my Lenovo H520S to boot to Ubuntu Server 20 LTS

[cakebaker67985]

so that came back with

total 4
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Sep 15 19:28 EFT

[MAFoElffen]

EFT? What the Heck? What is in that directory?

[MAFoElffen]

Okay. New plan.

exit
exit
sudo unmount /mnt

Start up gparted... give that disk a new gpt partition table.

Download an Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS ISO. 18.04 was the old server installer system and was before they started supporting SecureBoot again, so the Grub with be the correct flavor.
Burn it to a USB.
Install it.
Reboot.
On reboot

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

That is simpler and less time on a new install. There is just strange things going on there. And this is simpler at this point. WOW.

[cakebaker67985]

Sorry for taking so long to get back.

So I used gparted to delete all the partitions, then created 1 big new etx4 partition. I installed Ubuntu server 18.04 LTS, and here's where it gets interesting... it installs just fine, the first reboot where it asks you to take the media out and hit entre works and it boots into ubuntu server and everything works, I run the first two commands and they work, then when I try the last command it says the system needs to reboot after the 2 command, now when I do this I get the dreadful "No operating system found" error...

[MAFoElffen]

Aaaaaa.... It is UEFI only... it has to create at least a 256MB Minimum (usually 500MB - 1GB) partition marked as EFI/ESP for UEFI to boot. So if you had left it blank, with just the GPT partition table, it would have created that... Or if you have created a 500MB - 1GB EFI partition, formatted as Fat32, again marked as EFT/ESP, it would have used that as, and done the rest with the unallocated spaced on it's own.

One of the big bug's that I have found with the new (20.04 and newer) Server Live Installer, it that it doesn't play well with pre-partitioned drives. Not the EFI partition, but with any other's. It likes the drive to be empty/barren.

Up to try that again?

[cakebaker67985]

Yeah I'm definitely up for trying that! I really wanna get this working XD

I used gparted on a live boot to delete all the partitions, and left the drive unallocated. Then I installed Ubuntu server 20.04 LTS, the install went fine, but It didn't reboot into the system it came back with no OS found again. So I went back into the live boot and looked at the partitions, it seems to have done everything right.

There is

/dev/sda1 fat32 512MB boot, esp 
/dev/sda2 ext4 1GB 
/dev/sda3 lvm2 pv ubuntu-vg 464.26GB
unallocated 1.02MB

Now I did run another boot repair, BUT this time I went into advanced and unchecked the secure boot option, and as far as I can tell it installed grub with secure boot disabled. https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/dPNCHnq3mR/

Sadly it still didn't boot

[MAFoElffen]

I can see that you installed 20.04 Server again (Instead of what I asked you to try with trying to install Server 18.04)... The boot-repair was running 18.04... I can see that it created everything correctly, and all the pointers were correct. It's still a mystery of the why it is not booting.

I can see that it purged and installed grub-efi-amd64-signed, instead of grub-efi-amd64... but it did configure it as:

grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi --target=x86_64-efi --no-uefi-secure-boot
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.
Installation finished. No error reported.
df /dev/sda1
mv /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv/boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv/boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bkpbootx64.efi
cp /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv/boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi /mnt/boot-sav/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv/boot/efi/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi

grub-install --efi-directory=/boot/efi --target=x86_64-efi --no-uefi-secure-boot
Installing for x86_64-efi platform.

And finished without errors...

One thing I did notice is that the Boot-repair disk is still 18.04 and you haven't tried to install Server 18.04 yet right?

[cakebaker67985]

So I wiped the disk with gparted again, let it unallocated, I installed 18.04 again and had the same weird issue as last time where it rebooted after the install into the Operating system and worked, but When I rebooted it again it came back with no OS found.

I ran another boot repair and unchecked the secure boot option again: http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/mnHBkR3KB7/

I did notice something interesting in there

Disks info: ____________________________________________________________________
 
sda    : is-GPT,    no-BIOSboot,    has---ESP,     not-usb,    not-mmc, has-os,    2048 sectors * 512 bytes

The no-BIOSboot, is that something to be worried about?

[MAFoElffen]

This is how I setup my GPT disks (prepartitioned) here, no matter what they are going into...

GPT partition table
1MB unallocated before anything
1-5MB Partition, unformatted, Labeled boot_grub, type EF02 (bios_grub flag)
500mb-1G, fat32, Labeled EFI, type EF00 (ESP/EFI flag)

That way if can go into Legacy or UEFI machines.

"bios_boot" is for Legacy BIOS boot Machines to be able to boot GPT disks. The BIOS-boot partition is a container for GRUB 2's core. It is necessary if you install Linux on a GPT disk, and if the firmware (BIOS) is set up in Legacy (not EFI) mode. It must be located at the start of a GPT disk, and have a "bios_grub" flag.

This is NOT yours. Yours is UEFI only.

[MAFoElffen]

Please... Do this...

sudo fdisk -l | sed '/\/dev\/loop/,+3 d' 2> /dev/null | uniq

I want to see if anything there (partitons on sda) is marked as bootable...