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

[cakebaker67985]

Ah okay thank you that's good to know.

So I ran that command and it came back with:

Disk /dev/sda: 465.78 GiB
Disk model: WDC WD5000AAKX-0
Disklabel type: gpt

Device          start        end           Sectors      size    type
/dev/sda1     2048        1050623    1048576   512M   EFI system
/dev/sda2     1050624   3147775    2097152   1G       Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3      3147776  976771071 973623296 464.3G Linux filesystem


Disk /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv: 200 GiB

Disk /dev/sdb: 28.89 GiB,
Disk model: DataTraveler 3.0
DiskLabel type: dos

Device         Boot           Start             End             Sectors            Size              Id             Type
/dev/sdb1     *              0                  5999871      5999872          2.9G             0              Empty
/dev/sdb2                     5271500       5279499      8000                3.9M             ef             EFI (FAT-12/16/32)
/dev/sdb3                     6000640     60538880       54538241         26G             83            Linux

On sdb there is a Boot column but not on the sda drive, is this the issue?

[MAFoElffen]

Yes...

I looked through your posts last night and when I reviewed the result of your system-info script I noticed that it didn't say that sda1 was flagged with both ESP "AND" boot.

If you boot it up on a Gparted disk, can you make sure that the EFI partition, sda1, has both the ESP and boot flags?

[cakebaker67985]

In gparted sda1 is showing as having both boot and esp flags. This is from gparted on a live "try ubuntu" distribution, I'm not sure if that would make a difference.

[MAFoElffen]

Everything appears as it should. There is no visible reason from what I can see why this does not find the OS.

Try this ISO an see if it helps. Has a good GUI and some advanced tools... See if it "see's" the OS. If it can see it, it can probably boot it. And if it can boot it, it can probably create and build a workable Grub Boot loader to it.
https://www.supergrubdisk.org/rescatux/

[westie457]

Hi just joining in here, freely admitting that I know little to nothing about LVM and what I suggest may be way off target.

To me there are a few items in the last Boot report that seem strange, starting at line #241.

There appears to be something wrong with the fstab.

[MAFoElffen]

@westie457

That is more a "specific" of the boot-repair script of yannubuntu... when it is identifying which of the devices is what, and where things are... it cannot identify the LVM member as having the EFI esp member internally (true before the mount of the LVM). But it has the fstab. file in it. The sda2 is not readable, alone, because it is LVM over it. So it does not see a readable fstab file without using LVM (true). Sda1 is efi/esb and has no fstab on it. (true)...

After it identifies those pieces of the puzzle and activating and the mounting of LVM, it mounts the /efi into the root drive into LVM root, as /boot/efi... Then it is all pieced together in the system filesystem tree. His script inserts fstab entries into a temporary fstab file to do that to facilitate the chroot of the system from a script. Yann and I have talked about what we each do.

But because we haven't seen that ftsab file that resides within the LVM, we cannot confirm that. But if the only problem was a bad fstab entry, it would not say it could not find an OS, it would start to boot and say it had a mount error...

I do the same on my Ama-gi Project support LiveCD. An automated chroot to be able to repair an installed system.

The big difference in this last report from boot-repair, is that this last time, it did have many errors in installing and configuring Grub.

Does that make sense to you now?

[westie457]

@MAFoElffen

Thank you for the explanation, it sort of makes sense and also makes me realise how little I know about LVM.

[cakebaker67985]

So, I've run most of the scripts in the "boot" section, the Easy GNU/Linux Boot Fix, Check UEFI Boot, UEFI Partition Status, all of them come back okay all green ticks. Now the partitions the system detects are...

sda1 EFI System vfat boot,esp flags

sda2 Windows_/_Data_/_Other ext4

sda3 Cannot_mount LVM2_member

sdb1 Cannot_mount iso9660

sdb2 Windows_/_Data_/_Other vfat

loop0 Debian_GNU/Linux_10_ squashfs

dm-0 Ubuntu_18.04.5_LTS_ ext4

I ran the first script on the dm-0 partition which I think is right? it came back all fine

I ran the last script on the EFI sda1 partition and it came back all okay.

THe second script also came back okay.

In "Grub" I ran Restore Grub and it ran all okay as well, and I ran Update Grub Menus this also came back okay.

However... It still wont boot. I'm still confused at to why with 18.04 LTS the first reboot works, and then it stops working, and all the live usbs run just fine but it wont boot off the hard drive.

[westie457]

@cakebaker67985

In my first post in this thread I stated how little I know about LVM, also I have about the same level of not knowing about server installs.

If you are willing to try a different approach to attempt to resolve this issue it will involve yet another clean install.

If your answer is yes I will post some instructions after.

[cakebaker67985]

@westie457

Yeah I'm willing to try pretty much anything to get this working, I dont have the money to put together another machine XD