Can't boot Ubuntu Live in UEFI to fix GRUB

joe dizzy · 12-01-2020, 04:08 AM

Hi!

The other morning I woke up to a nice surprise: my dual boot Acer Aspire E5 (Windows 10 & Ubuntu 20) refused to boot up. Booting in UEFI secure boot led to the following message:
BootOrder not found. Initializing defaults.
creating boot entry "Boot0005" with label "ubuntu" for file "\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi"

Invalid image
Failed to read header: Unsupported
Failed to load image: Unsupported
start_image() returned Unsupported
StartImage failed: Unsupported

Followed by a blue screen saying it could not install security protocol: (0x2) Invalid Parameter. Hitting Enter told me that "something has gone seriously wrong" before shutting down.

Booting in UEFI non-secure boot led to effectively the same.

I've tried setting a UEFI file to boot from, but get "invalid image" when I choose it in BIOS.

The hard disk seems to be working fine. When I boot the laptop in Legacy mode it recognizes the USB and can launch Ubuntu Live. From there I can access my data (I have saved what I needed), mount various drives and so on. But I can't use BootRepair as that requires the computer to launch in UEFI, which I can't.

As far as I can tell (being mostly a newbie with very superficial understanding of Ubuntu), the boot partition has gone all wonky and weird. I don't know how or why, but I am kind of hoping against hope, that there is a way to fix it.

Any pointers?

colorpurple21859 · 12-01-2020, 05:54 AM

boot the ubuntu usb, post the output of

Code:

parted -l

and/or
Go here and download the 64bit iso, put on usb and see if it will boot in uefi mode https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/files/ either way that it boots, generate a boot-info file and post.

joe dizzy · 12-01-2020, 06:05 AM

Thanks for the reply.

Please do not underestimate how very, very, very, very stupid I am.

It turns out, once I loaded up the boot menu with F12, and picked the USB stick in non-secure UEFI I could easily install boot-repair, which seems to have fixed the issue. At least in so far as that I can now load up the laptop normally. I still think I messed up the dual boot installation somehow (I have two windows boot options for example, only one for Ubuntu), which is probably going to be a recurring source of problems for me. But so far things are going ok.

Boot-repair did post that there was an error and gave me URL. Not sure what to make of that.

yancek · 12-01-2020, 06:12 AM

Was the failure to boot an attempt to boot Ubuntu? windows? both Ubuntu and windows?
Have you been successfully dual booting for some time?
Are both Ubuntu and windows 10 installed UEFI?
Did you have Secure Boot enabled?
Did you make any changes, particularly in regard to booting or BIOS just prior to this problem?

The URL you got from boot repair should be posted here as there are quite a number of members who are very familiar with these problems and may be able to help. If boot repair showed an error, it would be useful for you to post what that error was. Best to post the URL from boot repair so you can get some help in understanding what the problem might have been.

joe dizzy · 12-01-2020, 06:28 AM

It wouldn't load anything at all. It went straight from the acer logo to the error message. I didn't get to pick which OS to launch.

As far as I can remember they're both in UEFI. Currently running without Secure Boot. I'll turn secure boot back on right after posting this to see if there are any problems.

Before the problems started I didn't change anything as far as I can recall. I think the only thing I "installed" the night before were some puzzle sets for the Microsoft Jigsaw app. (That's the kind of leet haX0R lifestyle I live.)

The URL boot-repair gave me is this one: http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/R8pCbcXkZj/

This is the summary. Which I understand is not great, but I have only a very vague idea what it means.

Quote:

Warning: The driver descriptor says the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes.
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only
Windows is hibernated, refused to mount.
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only
The disk contains an unclean file system (0, 0).
Metadata kept in Windows cache, refused to mount.
Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)
Could not mount read-write, trying read-only
/usr/share/boot-sav/bs-cmd_terminal.sh: Zeile 177: Warnung: Kommansosubstitution: NULL byte in der Eingabe ignoriert.

EDIT:
Interestingly enough, when I enable secure boot it seems to launch normally. But for a split-second the original error message (post #1) flashes up before the screen is replaced by my regular OS selection menu.

colorpurple21859 · 12-01-2020, 09:42 AM

Quote:

Falling back to read-only mount because the NTFS partition is in an
unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation
or fast restarting.)

settings>power>additional power settings>choose what the power button does>settings currently not available>
or
control panel>hardware and sound>power options>choose what the power button does>settings currently not available>
disable fast startup/boot, sleep and hibernation.

Every once in a while a windows update will re-enable these settings.

Disable fast boot in bios if it exist

joe dizzy · 12-02-2020, 03:05 AM

I've changed those, and ran boot-repair again with no problems. But I still get that error message flashing up when I start the laptop. Something seems to be wrong somewhere, even if it doesn't immediately affect anything else.

yancek · 12-02-2020, 06:55 AM

Does your most recent boot repair output still show the 'unclean filesystem error'? If that's the case, take a look at the link below which gives a detailed explanation of problems with hibernation/fastboot. You may need to run chkdsk from windows.

https://itsfoss.com/solve-ntfs-mount...s-8-dual-boot/

Does your most recent boot repair still show the large number of EFI boot entries in the BIOS for Ubuntu? In your initial post, boot repair indicates it is creating an EFI boot entry "Boot 0005". You also have an Ubuntu entry Boot 0000 and both point to the same file and should work. You also have a massive number of ubuntu EFI entries (lines 58-96) which are not necessary and are duplicative and can be deleted.

Note on line 51 of boot repair (Boot Order) there is no entry for ubuntu.
Note on line 49, Boot Current shows 0003 which is Linpus Lite. Change the boot priority to Boot 0000 or Boot 0005 which should be correct ubuntu entries.
Do you or did you have Linpus Lite installed?

colorpurple21859 · 12-02-2020, 03:07 PM

boot into ubunut and open a terminal

Code:

sudo mkdir /mnt/sda1
sudo mkdir /mnt/sda4
sudo mkdir /mnt/sda5
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
sudo mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/sda4
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt/sda5

Do you get any messages about disabling fastboot/hibernation when the partitions are mounted?

joe dizzy · 12-04-2020, 07:00 PM

No, I can mount them without any issues.

yancek · 12-05-2020, 06:49 AM

Boot Order not found is pretty unusual as it usually indicates that a specific boot entry is not found. I notice there is efibootmgr output in 3 locations in the boot repair script and the all show Boot Current as Linpus Lite. Have you tried changing this in the BIOS firmware to set first the entries for Ubuntu: Boot 0000 or Boot 0005 or the windows entry Boot 0001. What happens, same error?

colorpurple21859 · 12-05-2020, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Boot Order not found

I had an acer laptop that would do that, never did figure out why, but could always go in bios and change the boot order and boot in uefi mode