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I'm trying to install ubuntu on a very old 2011 vintage Toshiba laptop. From what I can tell this has no UEFI, only BIOS. In the BIOS itself it has no boot options other than fast boot or normal boot. I used Rufus to make a bootable USB and couldn't even get it to boot until I selected MBR and also the flag "add fixes for old BIOSes" Now it boots from USB fine and completes the installation of Ubuntu. However, after powering down and removing USB it will not boot. It just says "boot failed" and kicks be back to BIOS. I believe my hard drive is not partitioned correctly for an old BIOS and this is my issue. I've found several sets of instructions for fixing this but they all seem conflicting and very confusing to me. Can anybody help? Thanks.

bjh
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  • According to you, your problem is hardware specific, but you don't give us any information about the hardware except 2011 Toshiba. Tell us the exact hardware you have. That being said, I find it incredulous that there are no boot options. I also have doubts that it doesn't support UEFI. By 2011, UEFI was ubiquitous. Did you read the manual? Is there no splash screen on boot to tell you how to access the firmware settings? – Nmath Aug 24 '22 at 18:06
  • Have you tried using Unetbootin instead of rufus? Instead of selecting a distribution at the top of the Unetbootin window "Distribution", select "Diskimage" and then select the Ubuntu iso file you have. It has always worked well with BIOS systems for me in the past. – mchid Aug 24 '22 at 18:08
  • The other option, which is what I used on windows7 to make a bootable Ubuntu USB to install on a 2011 Toshiba laptop, is Universal USB Installer aka "pendrivelinux". This one is similar, make sure to select the iso file and also to format the USB drive. – mchid Aug 24 '22 at 18:11
  • Laptop is a Toshiba model A665-S5170 . My problem is not that I cannot make a bootable USB. I solved that problem before I posted. That is working fine. I assumed (possibly completely wrongly) that I have old BIOS, not UEFI because of the options I had to use to make that USB stick boot correctly. USB now boots fine, completes entire erasing of hard drive and installation of Ubuntu. As I stated in my original post, my problem is that I cannot boot a second or subsequent time AFTER I remove the USB. – bjh Aug 30 '22 at 19:01
  • @author Any solution found yet? – Allender Nov 16 '23 at 13:11

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