Unable to boot fresh install

[Steve]

Hi guys
I’m going around in circles trying to get my little notebook to boot up with Kubuntu 18.04. First let me say I’ve had it working fine recently with 18.04 but messed around with some files and inadvertently screwed it up so thought I’d reinstall.
I downloaded the 64bit iso onto a usb stick using Rufus on a windows pc I have. Selected the usb drive in UEFI and sure enough it booted up fine giving the ‘Try’ or ‘Install’ options. I tried the ‘Try’ option to make sure it still worked which it did then selected the install icon on the desktop and every thing seems to install ok. Now I’m sure in the past when installing distro’s you are told to remove the installation usb then it reboots but that doesn’t happen with this install because if I remove the usb before it reboots when it does reboot it says ‘No boot medium’ and goes no further. Leaving the usb drive in place and rebooting simply goes through the whole Try or Install procedure again and so on..., what am I doing wrong please?.
thanks
Steve

[SpecialEd]

Boot from the USB and check to make sure you actually installed it on your HDD.

[papakanush]

Maybe fire up on the live medium again, and go to Gparted or whatever disk manager you've got, and check to see that boot is set on the right partition.

[GreyGeek]

Just do the reinstall again but this time select the manual partition option, delete all partitions except sda1, making it your whole drive, and select Btrfs as your root filesystem for /.

Then, after you first boot up, and before every update, take snapshots of @ and @home. Then, if something you experiment with blows up your system just roll back to your most recent snapshots. Takes about 3-5 minutes.

[Steve]

Hi guys
Thanks for the replies but still going round in circles��. My little laptop is one of those with just 32gb drive so I deleted all the partitions,created a 40mb one for the efi boot and the remainder as /. The install carried on to the end but when rebooted got the ‘Try it or Install it’ screen again. Removing the usb drive and rebooting I got the dreaded ‘No bootable device’ again. Hugely frustrating as I’ve been using various Linux distros for years on many different pc’s and always happily managed with the ‘guided use entire disk’ installation option but this one ?? . not quite sure what to try next as up until a few days ago I had 18.04 running happily on this machine and yes I used the ‘guided use entire disk’ option so not sure what’s changed?.
Steve

[GreyGeek]

Without putting my pinkies on your machine I could only guess at what your problem is. But, from past experience with other "hands on" repairs, there is something about your install that you are neglecting to tell us.

Perhaps if you booted into your install USB (assuming) and then used dd to make every byte on the HD a zero, then reinstall mbr to that HD, set the boot flag, then attempt a reinstall of 18.04, using a "clean slate"..

[Steve]

Thanks again.
I’m beginning to wonder if the Rufus tool may be to blame which I use on a Windows 10 machine to create the usb install drive.
one option in it I chose was to use ‘bios or uefi’ in the setup which I assumed would satisfy my uefi 64bit pc? maybe I should have selected just uefi? I was quite used to burning the midnight oil many moons ago trying to configure Linux to work on different machines. I did notice that pressing f12 on booting up to get to the boot menu there was no entry so for some reason the grub is not being installed?. I’ll keep at it as I don’t give in easily��
regards
Steve

[Qqmike]

My little laptop is one of those with just 32gb drive

And yet it must be a "newer" laptop (>2011 or so) as you are sure the laptop uses UEFI, right? If the answer is Yes, then you do want a full UEFI installation of 64-bit Kubuntu, and so your USB flash drive (Kubuntu installer medium) must boot in UEFI mode. You did say,

... created a 40mb one for the efi boot

so it sounds like you do have that UEFI boot partition, probably sda1 (that partition is called the ESP; viewed in gparted or the KDE partition manager, it should have a flag on it like "esp-boot").

So, my point here is that you are confidant that you did a proper UEFI installation of Kubuntu, right? Except ...... possibly ..... you aren't sure of the "quality" of that RUFUS USB you made?

Now, assuming your USB is OK, and it may be OK, when you booted your PC with that USB, did you enter the BIOS-firmware of the PC and select from its boot menu the USB to boot from ... and -- VERY IMPORTANT -- was that USB listed with something like UEFI or EFI in its description (in this BIOS boot menu we are talking about here)?

[Steve]

Hi guys
Success!. Tried the latest version of Rufus as I was using an earlier one, still gave errors and would only boot up with the usb drive plugged in so after much head scratching I delved into the uefi settings and seemed to have sorted it? I say seemed to have sorted it I’m still not sure what I did but it works ok now. I assume an installation of Kubuntu doesn’t touch any Bios or Uefi settings so I must have altered some setting earlier, but thanks again to all who replied.
cheers
Steve

[Qqmike]

Maybe you simply selected the option to boot by UEFI (in your BIOS settings). Whatever you did, you might review your BIOS settings, don't touch them or change them!, just write them down -- especially those settings under the "Boot" category (or the Boot tab in BIOS). Glad you got it, Steve.