17.1 Cinnamon 64bit not booting after installation

[Deuxis]

Hello, I just tried to install Linux Mint 17.1, 64bit Cinnamon version and while the Live CD behaved well (actually I'm using it right now), and the installation didn't have any problems, when I try to boot the installed system, it doesn't even go as far as the GRUB menu. It shows the normal BIOS loading screen, blackscreens for a few seconds, displays some information about using patents for a number of things, at the end of that a message that it's closing EXT or whatever it is called (you probably know what I mean and if not I can reboot and check what specifically is written here, but it's nothng special) and then presents me with BIOS boot menu. If I choose the hard drive, it repeats everything from the blackscreen onwards and ends up at boot menu again, the only other options are CD drive (empty) and network card.

My computer is a laptop that matches all the requirement for this version, it's 64bit and all, 4GB RAM etc, but it has the Nvidia Optimus system that's known to cause problems. I tried the pinned fix, but holding shift at any point of the loop does nothing. I'm no expert but I think it either doesn't properly read grub's boot thingie or said thingie is broken. I tried reinstalling it all, but nothing changed.

EDIT: I noticed that I installed it with LVM thinking it was something else, so I reinstalled without it. During that I was able to snap pictures of occuring communicates, which I put as attachments. This one is an error thar I forgot about, it appears after choosing to reboot when the installation finishes:

afterinstal.jpg

This is what gets displayed when trying to boot from hard drive:

bootloop.jpg

I also have no idea what does the Media Test Failure line mean, as everything previously worked perfectly and now on Live CD I'm also able to use everything normally, even mount hard drive partitions.

[Deuxis]

bump, I really need help

[kukamuumuka]

The hard drive is not bootable in the bios-settings. Your computer tries to boot from network (PXE). Did you install grub to the hard drives´s MBR when installing?

[Deuxis]

I'm afraid that I'm a noob and I barely even know what MBR means. And yes, it should have been installed, as I installed the system with the default "Install Linux Mint" thingie on Live CD, and didn't mess with anything. Could you please tell me how to check that?

[Deuxis]

After some googling and half-understanding the problem I tried boot-repair. It tells me: GPT detected. Please create a BIOS-Boot partition (>1MB, unformatted filesystem, bios_grub flag). This can be performed via tools such as Gparted. Then try again.

As I don't have anything to lose on that hard drive, and Gparted tells me I have 1.02MiB of unformatted space, I tried but I don't know how to flag a partition, Gparted doesn't seem to give me that option. My time today is ending, will edit that post if I learn something.

EDIT: Nevermind, I'm an idiot and didn't apply changes. XD Now it starts to get weird: boot-repair tells me "The boot of your PC is in EFI mode, but no EFI partition was detected. You may want to retry after creating a EFI partition (FAT32, 100MB~250MB, start of the disk, boot flag).". The thing is, Gparted shows me a fat32 512MiB partition at the start of the disk with a "boot" flag and mount point specified as "/mnt". But Gparted also shows me a warning in the informations:
"Unable to read the contents of this file system!
Because of this some operations may be unavailable.
The cause might be a missing software package.".
I don't know if it should be doing that, and the fact that boot-repair doesn't seem to notice that partiion makes me wonder if the problem isn't lying there

EDIT2: boot-repair lets me continue anyway, I tried and it all seemed to go pretty good, but I accidentally closed the final message, so I have no idea if it worked or returned some error. I will reboot and check if anything changed and if not I'll run boot-repair again and see what's in the final message but now mite time is seriously ending.

[Deuxis]

I'm back, the boot-repair certainly did something, as the fat32 partition at the start of disc now doesn't display a "not readable" warning in Gparted, but I still wasn't able to boot from hard drive, just like prevously. So I ran boot-repair again trying to get that last message, and when it started it didn't display the same warning as last time ("didn't find the fat32 partition" whatever it is called), but instead that: "BIOS-Boot detected. You may want to retry after deactivating the [Separate /boot/efi partition:] option. Do you want to continue?". And that's the exact same thing that it tells me when I try to start it now, but I don't see much sense in trying to run it third tme, as nothing seems to have changed after the second. Anyway, the last message boot-repair showed me after running that time was that: "everything went good without any errors, if you're still having problems, submit that link to boot.repair@gmail.com or to your favourite support forum" and that's the link: http://paste2.org/9dtX5fDH. Sadly, I'm not able to read any vital information here, so I still need help.

shameless self-bump

If nobody replies, I'll probably try running boot-repair again without the [Separate /boot/efi partition:] option like it told me, but that's only because I don't have any other ideas, I doubt it'll do anything.

EDIT: one last thing I keep forgetting to mention: my previous Linux Mint, Petra, was installed by a friend, and he told me that he had problems with 64bit version so he installed 32bit. This laptop ran 64bit Windows 7 and 64bit Ubuntu (forgot distribution) and is now running 64bit Linux Mint Rebecca on LiveCD, but what I'm experiencing now trying to install the damn thing might be the same problem as he had, which would mean it's somethign with 64bit Linux Mint version failing to properly install booting things on that laptop for some weird reason. The laptop is Lenovo Ideapad Z570 with nothing special as far as I know asides of the Nvidia Optimus technology I mentioned in the first post, but if it's something related to hardware or BIOS on this specific laptop, knowing which laptop it is would probably help anyone trying to help me

[Deuxis]

Like I thought, boot-repair without that option didn't work, and installing a 32bit version did. That's extremely bizzarre and confirms that it's somehow a problem with installing 64bit versions of Linux Mint. Therefore I'm filing a bug report and referencing this topic as a reference, please don't delete it for some time. Suggestions of how to fix it are still welcome though, as I'd still like to have 64bit version installed, but it's not a priority now.