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I have installed ubuntu (MATE, minimal installation) on my laptop (SSD, HP brand), and it is a single boot system (no Windows).

Everything was OK for a few days, and I shut down and restarted several times with no issues. Today I fully charged the laptop before shutting down (via the login menu rather than by holding the power key, if that is relevant).

On restarting, the display was stuck on a blue hp logo and the words "press esc to access startup menu". No key combination was able to access the startup menu or anything else, so it was not possible to change BIOS settings.

Eventually, after about half an hour of freezing, I was able to access the BIOS and boot to a recovery USB. I am about to reinstall ubuntu but want to avoid having to wait for a long time/find or create a recovery USB/reinstall my operating system and reinstall software in future.

My questions:

  • is this common, or a known problem with HP laptops?

  • is this due to broken hardware or something to do with the os?

  • if the latter, how do I stop this happening in the future?

Information

  • legacy storage is disabled and secure boot is disabled

  • BIOS surestart has "dynamic runtime scanning of boot block" checked -- EDIT-- I have now unchecked this

  • there is TPM embedded security, "clear TPM" is set to "no"

  • system management command, under "utilities" is checked

  • USB storage boot is checked in the advanced boot settings tab

A disk check from a live USB reveals no problems, but the BIOS system diagnosis said "no hard drive installed". My partitions are:

/dev/sda1 512MiB fat32, flags: boot, esp. EFI system partition

/dev/sda2. 238GiB ext4

I am new to linux, but this does not look right. Is it possible that the surestart technology could have messed up my partitions? If not, are these problems likely due to failing hardware or something else?

UPDATE

I was able to fix the problem temporarily by using the advanced options in boot-repair and reinstalling grub. Then on waking my laptop from sleep the screen froze and when I rebooted it said "no harddrive found". This time the startup menu is not freezing for ages, but strangely the harddrive seems to have completely vanished. Nothing appears in the boot menu unless I insert a recovery USB, and when I try to install to harddrive the only available disk is the USB itself on /dev/sda. Doing a disk check from BIOS says no harddrive found, and from the recovery USB flashes up the message below for about half a second before then running checks and saying disk OK (maybe OK refers to the USB disk though?)

[ 0.000000] [Firmware bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata: please update microcode to version: 0xb2 (or later)
[ 9.318668] tpm tpm0: a TPM error (7) occurred trying to read a pcr value
[ 9.371830] Couldn't get size: 0x800000000000000e
[ 9.371847] MODSIGN: couldn't get UEFI db list
[ 9.373971] Couldn't get size: 0x800000000000000e

Sorry if this isn't actually an ubuntu issue; not knowing much about computers I can't tell if this is due to hardware or some problem with the linux installation.

user861384
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  • If it boots up ok using LiveCD I would reinstall OS choosing wipe option to give yourself a fresh install ... possibly seeing hardware issue tho hard to tell especially as you say disk check is OK ... as always keep all valued files on a Dropbox folder – Scott Stensland Aug 18 '18 at 03:37
  • I'm just about to do so, but I am curious as to why this happened. Is it possible the HP surestart technology to "fix the BIOS before booting anything else" has messed up my original partitions? I am a beginner to linux but the partition layout above doesn't seem right. having now disabled the "dynamic runtime scanning of boot block" am I likely to still have similar problems in future? – user861384 Aug 18 '18 at 12:02
  • I tried reinstalling but it did not work. Booted live USB, ran boot repair, and it said there were errors. I also tried reinstalling grub using boot repair. The results are at http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/xRbfdVCCT5 but I don't know enough to interpret this – user861384 Aug 19 '18 at 08:21
  • Boot repair also says "make the BIOS boot on sda1/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi file!" but I cannot find the option to do this in the BIOS menu – user861384 Aug 19 '18 at 08:23
  • possible approach https://askubuntu.com/questions/281321/grub-efi-entries-and-boot-repair – Scott Stensland Aug 19 '18 at 15:18
  • Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! It appears you tried to edit this post while not logged in. Please log into your user account when you want to edit your posts so they don’t have to go through review and it becomes clear that you, the original author, intends these changes. Thanks. – David Foerster Aug 19 '18 at 23:17
  • Does this answer your question? MODSIGN: Couldn't get UEFI db list Couldn't get size: 0x800000000000000e – karel Feb 21 '20 at 07:04

0 Answers0