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I have an Asus K501L, dual boot with windows 10 and Ubuntu (16.04), installed on separate drives. Everything was fine for a year. Now it won't boot either on Windows or Ubuntu. Reinstalling windows/linux from a bootable key doesn't work either.

I started playing with CUDA and display drivers for a research project, and I guess I messed up the intel driver (Intel hd graphics 5500). After a while without touching anything sensitive (two weeks), on boot Ubuntu didn't get past the splash screen. The screen turned black, no possibility of accessing the terminal to do anything. I tried booting on windows and got the error message VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE associated with igdkmd64.sys. I was able to get into safe mode, updated the driver, rolled it back, played with the power options but nothing worked.

I noticed that if my computer went to sleep and I turned it back on after having passed the ubuntu splash screen I actually was able to log into ubuntu but my mousepad wasn't working and and external mouse didn't work either. I played with the terminal to try and fix the drivers and rebooted but nothing worked.

I used a bootable USB with Ubuntu 14.04 to reinstall the ubuntu partition but the install crashed halfway through, which broke grub. Now whenever I try installing ubuntu (14.04.1 / 14.04.5 / 16.04 / with several keys) the libraries don't decompress correctly and the install never starts.

Windows can't repair the install from a USB and the installer says that all partitions are in GDP format and so Windows can't install anywhere. Deleting/formatting the partitions doesn't help.

I have no data to recover I just want to wipe everything and install a new OS. Any ideas?

terdon
  • 100,812
Alex Td
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  • If drives are gpt, then your installs were UEFI. Windows only boots from gpt with UEFI. You then must boot installer whether Windows or Ubuntu in UEFI boot mode. Your UEFI/BIOS should show two boot modes for flash drive installer, both UEFI:flash and flash which is the BIOS boot. If you have already deleted everything this will not show anything. Post the link to the Create BootInfo summary report. Is part of Boot-Repair: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info And if newer system, probably better to use 16.04, older version may not have newer drivers. – oldfred Dec 09 '16 at 18:49
  • @oldfred Thank you for your answer. I did start the ubuntu boot in UEFI and while I managed to actually get it to start (choose computer name ...) the installer in itself kept working with no progress. I will try this with windows though! – Alex Td Dec 09 '16 at 18:58
  • If installing Ubuntu to a second drive with UEFI, grub2 will only correctly install the UEFI version of grub to ESP - efi system partition on sda. And if installing to second drive best to partition in advance and include an ESP on sdb, even if not immediately used. http://askubuntu.com/questions/743095/how-to-prepare-a-disk-on-an-efi-based-pc-for-ubuntu Windows requires a variety of partitions with UEFI, so best to let it do its own thing. – oldfred Dec 09 '16 at 19:34

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