Hello, I had a weird boot issue today on my Dell M4700 (single boot - Neon only) and I am curious if anyone could offer any insights.

Powered up the laptop but instead of seeing Grub I had a message "no bootable medium" (or similar)
Powered down and tried a few more time with the same result.
Plugged in a USB with a live Neon, booted into the bios boot options (F2) and selected the usb UEFI option and booted as expected. Was able to mount the internal HD and view the contents with Dolphin.
Powered down, removed the USB drive and tried again with the same results, "no bootable medium"
Went back into the bios and changed from UEFI to Legacy. The boot attempt yielded "Invalid Partition" Ok, I powered down and returned to the Bios boot options and returned to UEFI.
Tried booting as normal but had the original result.
On the next boot attempt, I hit F12 to see the boot option and manually selected the Neon UEFI option. It now booted as normal!!!!!!!
So,.... I once again exited and powered down the laptop and powered up the laptop (this time without hitting any of the "F keys" and it booted normally.
I have repeated powering down and powering up (not the "reboot" option but the "shut down" option) a few times now and it is back to booting normally as if nothing ever happened.

Does anyone have any idea what may have happened?
It is a very old SSD so I am wondering if it is starting to fail or something like that.
Any insights would be useful.
Steve

Maybe:

Dell Precision M4700 System BIOS

Urgent | A19 | 1/9/2019 | BIOS

http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER0535607 ... 700A19.exe

I will take a look to see what bios version I am using but that link is a .exe (windows). Any idea on how I would run it on a linux only computer? I am expecting that my bios version is very old

Steve

Just took a look, I am running A17

Any idea how I would upgrade to the latest?

Steve

You have to create a msdos-formatted
BOOTABLE USB-stick.

Then copy the BIOS-exe onto it.
Boot, while holding F12.
Select stick.
Enter exe-filename + RETURN

Watch it doing its thing.

The problem is: BOOTABILITY

Possibilities:
Use any windows/dos, to
create the stick.

Dell has a tool to create it.
It is a crazy one, but it works.

(Dell offers its BIOS from unsecure servers.
It's Your risk. Maybe, they are forced to risk
their customers' security by the American ministry-
of-global-and-permanent-war. Who knows?)

You could do a throw-away installation of
Microsoft-Spyware-10 within VirtualBox, and
then do it from there.

Thanks for the info, I will start the heavy research into the process.

Steve

Well, the laptop went kaplooy again.

I think I may be looking at a few issues. #1 being a old dying SSD. I think I am going to do a few things.
Get a new SSD for starters.
Temporarily install windows so I can easily update the bios to the latest version.
Remove windows!!!!!!!
Install Neon

I have had too many weird issues in the last 3 months that continusly hints at a HD issue. Things like booting in the morning (without installing anything the day before) and the boot fails. Booted with a USB edition and the disk partition is unmountable. Weird stuff like that, forcing me to reinstall.

I think a bit of a fresh start may be the best

Steve

Well, the magical mystery of what is going on continues.

After the system went kaplooy, I have just been running the laptop via the usb live edition for the last few hours.

I accidentally rebooted the laptop without the usb stick in, and to booted again normally. The magic of Linux I suppose!!!!!!

Ok, so all kidding aside, yeah that is what happened, it just decided to boot as if nothing happened. I will be using another computer in the house to use DDCopy to create a bootable windows usb (not available on Neon) and install win temporally so I can use native tools to upgrade the bios. I am just scratching my head why it decided to boot normally again.

PS DDCopy would be really useful to have available!!!!!!!

Scratching my head but still in a good mood!!!!!!
Steve

In Your Dell-firmware setup (F2), You can
select/enter Your bootx64.efi-bootloader
in the boot-options. Make a fixed entry
for it, there. Maybe, this helps.

With Latitude-laptops, this is doable.
Probably, with Precision-laptops, too.

Dell firmware-setup is great for Linux
and BSD.

Interesting, i will give that a try

Steve

Just gave that a try. i uncheck other options, added a new entry with a unique name and pointed it to bootx64.efi. First boot attempt was successful. Will see how it works for the following days

Steve