Can't boot Linux Mint Cinnamon on Lenovo laptop- SOLVED

[TheSpidermonkey]

I'm currently living in China and had to buy a new laptop, a Lenovo E550. Windows 8.1 was all in Chinese, but I thought I could just the change the language. WRONG! Microsoft don't let you do this because of piracy or something. I tried updating to Windows 10 to see if it helped (this may have been a mistake), but it was no different.

So someone suggested I try Ubuntu. I went for Cinnamon instead because I liked the look of it. I downloaded and installed it as a dual boot with Windows. (I disabled Secure Boot, and set up new partitions, following instructions I found on the internet.) However I can't boot it, other than from a USB stick, so it wipes my settings every time. I've done a lot of googling, and tried several variations on a solution which i don't really understand, but which involves mounting the partition, using chroot and installing or updating Grub. I get an error message about "Failed to get canonical path of /cow." I've tried using unetbootin and EasyBCD, but if I make it try to boot from these I get kicked into a screen which must be part of Windows, because it's in Chinese- which means I can't read it. It seems to be some kind of error message, from which I can only go to Windows boot-up or the BIOS screens. I've looked at everything there but I've already disabled Secure Boot and allowed legacy as well as UEFI (if I only allow legacy it just doesn't boot at all.)

I don't love Windows, and if I have to get rid of it and just run Linux I'll do that. But I'm worried that, since I can't boot anything else, if I get rid of Windows I'll just have a useless laptop. If I have to boot from USB every time I'll do that, as long as it doesn't wipe my settings. Please help!

I know very little about Linux, as must be obvious from my post, and I'm OK with Windows but can't read anything but the simplest messages in Chinese.

[TheSpidermonkey]

Update: I couldn't stand it any more, and reinstalled, wiping Windows completely. This seems to have worked (so far, fingers crossed.) If anybody knows what the problem was though I'd be really interested to know. I'll leave this up for another 24 hours before marking it as solved, if that's OK.

[gold_finger]

Hard to know for sure, but sounds like you may have installed Mint in different boot mode than Windows. New computers can boot in either UEFI mode (which is what Windows is/was using on yours), or Legacy/CSM/Bios mode. Even though the computer is set to boot in UEFI mode from the hard drive, it may not automatically use UEFI mode when booting from a live DVD/USB. Sometimes you need to invoke the firmware's boot menu to get a choice of mode to boot those in. So, my best guess is that your DVD/USB got boot in Legacy mode and therefore did a Legacy mode install to the drive. In that case, it won't work when you reboot in UEFI mode for the hard drive.

If you don't mind, boot into your installed Mint and post back the output from the following command in a terminal. I'm just curious to see how it ended up installed.

Code: Select all

sudo parted -l

Since Windows is gone, it really doesn't matter at this point what mode Mint is installed in. The system will work perfectly fine in either mode.

[TheSpidermonkey]

Hi gold_finger

Thanks very much for taking the trouble to respond. Since my last post I've had more problems- the internet connection kept disappearing, so I ran Update Manager, and that caused Cinnamon to crash. I reinstalled, ran Update Manager again, crashed again. So I've given up on Cinnamon, and have installed Ubuntu (though that desktop will take some getting used to...)

I think you're probably right about the EFI/ BIOS thing- with hindsight, it's probably how I burned the ISO onto the USB with Rufus. I'll mark this as solved and I'm grateful for your response.

[bbaker6212]

What is your wifi adapter? There have been various reports of intermittent problems with the Realtek wifi card/driver in Lenovo laptops due to energy management. Once that was turned off the intermittent connection problem went away. This is a default setting in Mint that is easily turned off.

Your prior problem was some kinda partition issue. Perhaps related to MBR versus CBT formatted partitioning that your complete re-install fixed. Just my guess.