Unable to boot 14.10 on Dell E6430

[Chris Coulson]

Yesterday morning, I tried to power on my laptop in the departure area of the airport, to be greeted with "No bootable devices found" message. After initially assuming that my SSD had failed, I realized I had an old bootable USB stick in my laptop bag with Raring on, which booted ok and allowed me to access the contents of my SSD. I ran fsck on it, and it didn't find any problems, and the SMART status appears to be ok.

After arriving back home, I created a bootable 14.04 USB drive, which also booted fine. I then created a bootable 14.10 USB drive, which failed to boot ("No bootable devices found"). What's worse, after trying to boot 14.10, my laptop would no longer boot any other USB stick. Fortunately, restoring the defaults in the Dell settings appears to clear everything and allows me to boot 14.04 from a USB drive. However, attempting to boot 14.10 again ends in the same way (unable to boot anything else).

This behaviour is fairly repeatable - I've tried it several times now and the result is always the same.

Utopic did work fine before and during the sprint. It seems that shim got updated midweek, but Saturday morning was the first time I powered off my laptop since it was updated.

My laptop is configured to use secure boot. The only version number I could find related to the firmware is the BIOS Version (A09)

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Have just flashed the latest firmware from http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=RR81V, so I'll try it again

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Ok, same behaviour with the latest firmware.

I've managed to get my machine to boot now by doing the following:

- Resetting the firmware on my laptop
- Booting to a 14.04 live install
- chroot'ing in to my install
- Downgrading shim + shim-signed (to 0.4-0ubuntu4 and 1.6+0.4-0ubuntu4 respectively)
- Running grub-install

One thing I've noticed is that "ubuntu" is now listed in the boot sequence screen of the Dell settings, whereas it wasn't listed when I first encountered the issues with booting (the boot sequence screen was completely blank)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.