I bricked my system... I think

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blindside
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Joined: Wed Apr 24, 2019 2:48 am

I bricked my system... I think

#1 Post by blindside »

I have been using MX Linux for a bit now but have a big problem of my own making. Initially, I tried to spruce up my terminal and ended up messing up my bashrc file. I am new to using vi, vim, nano, etc., so ended up not making any headway. The only issue was that any time I wanted to do anything as SU, I had to type "su -m" and I don't like that. I just installed MX pretty recently onto a new laptop, so I didn't really have much invested. I decided to check out Pop_OS for a minute and after setting up my bios for the live usb I created, it would restart and pretty much nothing would happen except for a ?command? prompt at the top left of the screen. Same thing happened with Ubuntu. I abandoned this and went back to MX. I could install it, but when I reboot it states:

No bootable devices found
Press F1 to retry reboot
Press F2 to reboot into setup
Press F3 to run onboard diagnostics

Tried again, got the same results. I'm at a loss, so any help would be greatly appreciated and specs are below.

D
-------------------------------------------------------
Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition
256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
8GB LPDDR3 2133MHz Onboard
Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620
Ubuntu Linux 18.04
8th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-8265U Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.9 GHz, 4 cores)
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

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Eadwine Rose
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#2 Post by Eadwine Rose »

If you have nothing of importance on the thing I would suggest just reinstalling, it's done in a jiffy after all :)
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mxer
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#3 Post by mxer »

Looks like you've overwritten your boot loader somewhere along the line, a re install will be the easiest & quickest way to get up & running again.
(FOSS, Linux, & BSD since 1999)

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blindside
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Joined: Wed Apr 24, 2019 2:48 am

Re: I bricked my system... I think

#4 Post by blindside »

Thank yall for the responses so far, but I just can't seem to get it reinstalled
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

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asqwerth
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#5 Post by asqwerth »

If it's an UEFI machine, perhaps the EFI partition still records POP as the first-to-boot bootloader. I read that on System76's machines, they now use systemd-boot instead of grub, so I have no idea if POP OS when manually installed on other machines does the same thing.

You may need to access BIOS to check on which distro's bootloader is listed first. Or run MX live on USB and in terminal, run

sudo efibootmgr

to get a listing.
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blindside
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#6 Post by blindside »

The first listing was for SUSE, and the rest MX. I played with suse for a minute. I just manually reinstalled with gparted on a live usb and the same thing happened.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

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asqwerth
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#7 Post by asqwerth »

Did you use efibootmgr command to set MX's bootloader as the first to boot? No point reinstalling MX yet again if SUSE is still set as the first bootloader in the EFI partition.

https://linux.die.net/man/8/efibootmgr

If you have already installed MX but can't boot into it, run (from live MX USB):

Code: Select all

sudo efibootmgr
to get a listing of the bootloaders and their assigned number.

Then use this command to make MX's bootloader first.

Code: Select all

sudo efibootmgr -o [MX's number],[Suse's number],[other numbers]
Then remove your live USB and try to reboot your machine.
Desktop: Intel i5-4460, 16GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics
Clevo N130WU-based Ultrabook: Intel i7-8550U (Kaby Lake R), 16GB RAM, Intel integrated graphics (UEFI)
ASUS X42D laptop: AMD Phenom II, 6GB RAM, Mobility Radeon HD 5400

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Stevo
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#8 Post by Stevo »

Most UEFI laptops let you manually set which efi file to boot from in their UEFI setup ("BIOS") program, too.

Huckleberry Finn

Re: I bricked my system... I think

#9 Post by Huckleberry Finn »

Or, maybe you'd like to get rid of the Suse boot entry also to make it sure:

The last number or character before the * next to Suse's name (or the whole between Boot * ). Examples:

Code: Select all

sudo efibootmgr

sudo efibootmgr –b 9 –B
sudo efibootmgr –b 14 –B
sudo efibootmgr –b A –B

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blindside
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Re: I bricked my system... I think

#10 Post by blindside »

I ran the built in Dell diagnostics and it said the ssd was good. I have tried to reinstall several times but nothing is working. One thing is that in the bootloader sequence, openSUSE is the first one on the list, so got rid of that one per #Huckleberry instructions. I tried reinstalling again and then the same thing happens when I try to boot into MX. No bootable devices found. Maybe there really *is* an issue with my ssd, but not sure how that would have happened
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.

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