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I installed Ubuntu 15.04 from an USB pendrive to my Toshiba Satellite U940.

Normally this works great, but this time it was a real struggle. I had several issues regarding grub2, installation failed due to grub and so on. Now I finally managed to get it working but my EFI doesn't boot from the SSD. I also tried boot-repair of course. Still no bootable device according to the EFI. I managed to get a few lines of output by my PC via a slow-motion video. It says: 

Failed to open \EFI\BOOT\grubx64.efi - Not Found
Failed to load image \EFI\BOOT\grubx64.efi - Not Found

and a few lines I can't properly read.

Boot-repair pastebin url is: http://paste.ubuntu.com/12623394/

I'm booting in UEFI mode, all secure boot measures disabled. No dual boot, all hard drives fully deleted before install. However I'm installing Ubuntu and grub on /sdb not /sda, as sdb is my SSD and sda my HDD. Can this cause problems? The boot order is set to boot first from the SSD.

karel
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Dustin Wortmann
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2 Answers2

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There are several odd things about your setup:

  • Your /dev/sda (a Toshiba MQ01ABD075_Y216FCTCS) is present, but doesn't appear to have a partition table or filesystem. This might be expected and harmless, depending on what that device is, but it's unclear what's causing this oddity.
  • Your /dev/sdb (a Samsung MZMPC032HBCD) is partitioned using the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table, but EFI-bootable disks normally use the GUID Partition Table (GPT).
  • Your EFI System Partition (ESP) is a logical partition on /dev/sdb (it's /dev/sdb6, to be precise). This might work, but only if your firmware isn't too finicky and if the NVRAM contains a pointer to the boot loader or if it's installed as EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi. At best, this is highly unusual.
  • The Boot Repair script turned up no evidence of any EFI boot loaders on /dev/sda or /dev/sdb. (/dev/sdc seems to be your emergency boot USB drive.) This is probably a bug in Boot Repair, but it makes it hard to judge what's actually booting.

Overall, I'd say you need to repartition /dev/sdb to use GPT. (You can completely repartition it or use gdisk to convert it from MBR to GPT.) The Ubuntu installer should use GPT when it's fed a blank disk for an EFI-mode installation; however, it might stick with MBR if it's fed a pre-partitioned MBR disk. (I've not studied what the Ubuntu installer does in such a case -- and it might do different things depending on the Ubuntu version.) Alternatively, you need to mount /dev/sdb6, figure out where your boot loaders are, and adjust their paths appropriately; or use efibootmgr to create an entry that points to the boot loader. You might want to read my page on EFI boot loaders, and especially the sub-pages on EFI boot principles and installing EFI boot loaders, for more information. The inline links earlier provide background information, and so are worth reading, too.

Rod Smith
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What helped was to not manually format the disks, rather let Ubuntu do the job. Strangely, no matter what I set as formation order etc., it didn't work. But when Ubuntu did it and formatted it as I did, it worked. Maybe the installer has trouble recognizing the EFI system partition. Or it's just a specific problem of my notebook.

Dustin Wortmann
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