Wow, that's quite a story. Sorry I seem to have missed some important points in your previous posts so you had to re-type it ...
From as far as I understand your situation to me it looks more like someone just grabbed some parts of the shelf, stuck them together in a way to fit your order and somehow installed the requested OS (although strange it was such an old version).
As for the in-place upgrade: Well, from my personal experience Linux based OSs seem to handle it quite well if one go the long incremental route. So, upgrading from a 19.04 or 19.10 should to 20.04 LTS should had been fine - I'm curious what happens these random hang ups. Could be some software issue causing "random" stuff due to multi-core execution in a not-so-predictable order - but also could be some hardware limitations. Hopefully you not get a somewhat-defective unit.
About try to enter the uefi/bios: Funny enough that's still something not officially standardized yet (at least to my knowledge) - so enter the system firmware can be done in a variety of ways. Many board manufactures seem to have agreed upon to at least support DEL as one of the hotkeys - at it was the most used back in the AT era before modern ATX took over. But it can also be pretty much anything ranging from more familiar keys like the F1-F12 keys (often F1 or F2 or anything F8-F12) to some weird key-combinations with any of the modifiers (ALT, CTRL, SHIFT). ESC to enter the firmware is rather untypical and is often used to get from the graphical logo to a more traditional text base boot screen (also TAB is sometimes used for that). It could also be not be able to be done from a keyboard but maybe require some hardware switch hidden in the box on the board itself.
But I agree with you - the staff should know how to access the bios or uefi firmware of a device they sold to you. Also: Not including some default password for a OS that requires a password (to my knowledge it's only possible to set up auto-logon - but not to remove the password entirely as on windows) is ... well, let's just say: Someone seem to had a bad day.
From what I get is you seem to get at least from the initial power up to the bootloader which then in turn at least tries to boot the OS. So, yea, open the case and taking out the storage (if not soldered) should at least confuse the system to no longer be able to boot which should give you some way to access the firmware. There's also a chance that it could be hard to detach the cmos-battery. Guessing from pictures I was able to find on the net by searching for what you have given us in your initial post suggest it's not a socketed one but should just hanging in their loosely with the wires terminated into a two-pin connector. Just detaching it for a few seconds should be enough to clear out the cmos which then should result in the system to halt on a cold boot with some text like "blah blah blah press <some key> to enter setup". Although not ideal as you have to deal with re-setting all the settings correctly (which may require some tries) it should be at least some almost guaranteed way to get a force-prompt.
It's always hard to analyze from far away. Just as an example I have a PC-Engines APU2 for some years now (can't remember the correct model - there'Re already at least one or maybe even two newer generations of it) - and it uses coreboot as its bios/uefi. To enter it's rather small set of settings I have to connect via serial and catch it right when I plug in the power. Luckly I only need to do that stunt if I have to change some very basic firmware setting. For anything else there'Re plenty of small tools available for the distro I run on it. So, yea, I know how it can steal a whole week of tinkering around and not getting any progress.
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Originally Posted by MAFoElffen
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