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I dropped my HP Pavillion laptop and I'm now having problems accessing windows and grub. I have ubuntu 18.04 and windows 10 installed. I was using the grub bootloader that came when I installed ubuntu. After dropping my laptop, grub will not show but (thankfully) ubuntu boots eventually. My screen stays completely black (not even lit up black where you can see it's turned on) until I can see the ubuntu loading screen.

I tried to reinstall grub using the boot-repair recommended settings which didn't work. I ran fdisk -l and these are the partitions detected

Device          Start        End    Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sda1        2048     534527     532480   260M EFI System
/dev/sda2      534528     796671     262144   128M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda3      796672 1807442666 1806645995 861.5G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda4  1910734848 1953517567   42782720  20.4G Windows recovery environment
/dev/sda5  1807443968 1889363889   81919922  39.1G Linux filesystem

I'm not sure how to proceed. I want to be able to use windows again, even if that means losing my data since I can't afford to buy another copy and I'm using the one that came pre installed on my laptop so I don't have any CDs or such for it. I don't have an external hard drive to be able to back up my data. Any help would be deeply appreciated.

EDIT: I took a look at the paste generated by boot-repair. Early in the file it says this:

============================= Boot Info Summary: ===============================

 => No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.

My hard disk is not partitioned in order. When I use the disks application on ubuntu, it says that /dev/sda is free space. Here is a picture of the disks gui. Disks gui for my system

From left to right, the partitions shown in the image are /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3, /dev/sda5, /dev/sda, /dev/sda4 and then /dev/sda again.

Some more info:

I'm unable to enter my UEFI menu. When I tap the f10 key to enter the menu, the screen stays completely black with no backlight and I can hear beeps when I press certain keys (e.g if I keep tapping the f10 key). I think the UEFI menu is loaded and running but not displaying.

toastedDeli
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  • I am not sure which physical damage would cause the described behaviour except if you had grub+windows on one physical disk and Ubuntu on another, and the drop damaged the windows drive (or loosened the connection). Do you have multiple drives installed? Are you able to access BIOS/UEFI settings? – danzel Apr 23 '19 at 15:40
  • It would help to have more information about your Laptop Model. Was there a Win10 preinstalled or is it an upgrade? Some HP Notebooks can recover with pressing [F11] at the boot. Some are more complicated: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04742289 ... Sometimes you'll just need a bootable win10 install medium. But every step could lead to a data loss in Win or in Ubuntu... It would be good to mount your Windows partition from Ubuntu and save the data external as first step. – LupusE Apr 23 '19 at 15:44
  • @danzel I have a single HDD drive. My laptop was on and running Windows at the time I dropped it. I'm about to reboot now to see if I can access UEFI. – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 15:45
  • @LupusE I can't find the exact model number from linux but I know it starts with "15-ab". I'll reboot and try pressing F11 now. – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 15:51
  • If Ubuntu boots, then GRUB is working properly, whether you see it or not. GRUB often displays nothing - tap the SHIFT key during boot to expose GRUB. – user535733 Apr 23 '19 at 15:54
  • @danzel When I try to enter my UEFI menu, I can hear beep sounds when pressing keys, almost like the bios is loaded but it is not displaying on the screen, it's just completely black without a backlight. – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 16:04
  • @LupusE Pressing F11 didn't work unfortunately, but it did prevent ubuntu from booting, almost like the recovery screen loaded but nothing was displayed. Something similar happens when I try to enter by BIOS/UEFI menu too; I can hear beeps when I press buttons but I do not see anything on screen. – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 16:07
  • @user535733 I just tried tapping shift during boot, but still, nothing was displayed. The screen is completely black (not even backlight) until ubuntu finally gets loaded. Is it possible that I've corrupted some low level/early booting display driver that is replaced by another display driver when the OS loads? – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 16:14
  • No. See https://askubuntu.com/questions/16042/how-to-get-to-the-grub-menu-at-boot-time – user535733 Apr 23 '19 at 16:17
  • @user535733 Thanks for pointing me to that page. I tried booting and holding shift, esc, and c (on separate boots) and none of them displayed the grub menu. I can't even get my UEFI menu to show. Do you have any other ideas? Thanks for the help so far. – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 16:27
  • @user535733 I just had a look at the report generated by the boot-repair tool. very early in the file, it says => No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda. Is this a problem? – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 16:35
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    Please add new information to your original question instead of burying important stuff deep in (unread) comments. Comments are intended to help you improve your question, not for conversation. – user535733 Apr 23 '19 at 16:38
  • It's usually the F10 key to enter BIOS during boot-up for an HP Pavilion. You could also try F2/6. Gnome-Disks shows your HDD to be physically undamaged. Doesn't mean there's no file corruption. As you can boot to Ubuntu you might save your data by mounting sda3, if you stored it in the Windows partition, which is bad practice. You must buy an external hdd for data backups. That's a fundamental requirement. – Paul Benson Apr 23 '19 at 18:04
  • @PaulBenson I've tried all f keys (I'm sure it was usually f10 as you said) and pressing f10 appears to alter the startup procedure for me (i.e linux wont eventually run like when I press nothing during boot). I suspect that the BIOS is running but not displaying, because a few seconds after tapping f10 I begin to hear beeps that I dont usually hear as I continue to tap f10. Almost like the bios makes a beep sound when you press a key. – toastedDeli Apr 23 '19 at 18:13
  • Clearly you have a hardware issue, not surprising as you dropped your laptop. The beeps at POST indicate that. Your manual will tell you what the various beep codes mean. I would disconnect the drive and try to bring up the BIOS screen. If your laptop cannot POST you may need a new one, especially if it's a faulty motherboard. – Paul Benson Apr 23 '19 at 20:53

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