Well, I managed to pull the pin on a grenade Monday morning. I was following an opensuse wiki post (wish I could give you the URL, but I am still in newcomer purgatory. The subject has to do with: SDB:Realtek_8169_driver_problem) and had started by enabling wake on LAN in BIOS, then restarted. The power turned on (fans spun), but no video output, no beeps, no lights by eth cable on back of computer
This confounds me as I would not expect the change I made to brick the mobo, and hopefully there is some way to restore.
Following this revolting experience, I am reluctant to experiment.
This just keeps careening around. Decided to try a SVGA cable and it works fine. Gets video to monitor, so looks like either the video card DVI circuit, the DVI cable, or the DVI port/circuit in the monitor has gone toes up. Will buy another DVI cable tomorrow and see if that is it. In the meantime, will continue with the SVGA.
That’s the good(?) news. The bad is that it has stopped dual booting and will only boot into Windows. So either,
the previously unused, but 2 year old SSD has crashed (it does not show up in Windows file explorer), or
the bootloader isn’t facilitating a dual boot.
The former seems the less likely (plus I am unsure how to test a SSD), so first how do I trouble shoot the bootloader?
EDIT: UPDATE: By pressing F12 during the boot process that now results in a Windows boot, a screen comes up:
Boot mode is set to UEFI with Legacy OPROM, secure boot off
UEFI:
Windows Boot Mgr (if selected, boots into Windows)
Ubuntu (if selected boots into Grub Screen and I select Ubuntu, it boots into UM18.04).
The good news is that (1) the SSD seems to be OK and (2) the grub screen is still there, bad news is that the computer does not boot into the Grub screen.
The other good news is that it narrows down what needs to be fixed, i.e., booting into the grub screen. How do I do this?
One of our authors wrote a great article on how repair boot on ubuntu systems. Please have look there as I’m sure you’ll find it useful. In a summary try the following:
Create a live CD. If you can boot to your Linux system you do not need to Live CD.
OK, turned out that doing a cold power up (after pulling the power cord to clear all the volatile memory) somehow changed the boot order. By breaking the bootup with F12, was able to restore the correct boot order, and get grub to show and work.
However, I kept wondering what would happen if I took out the existing HDD and the SSD, put in a spare HDD and installed 18.04.1 on that using my USB installer, i.e., would it find ethernet connectivity. And I tried to do just that, but am now concerned whether that was a bit too experimental.
The Ubuntu live disk was not able to install on the new HDD. Lots of errors.
I suddenly realized that this exercise might have somehow royally corrupted the boot loader? I will not know until I try to replace the SSD and the HDD, unless you already know that I have, or suspect that I have. Any opinions/guidance you can share with me before I try to replace the drives will be much appreciated. If this is probable, perhaps there is a fix? Thanks.
Sometimes it is good to sleep on a problem. It occurred to me that there was an older version of Ubuntu (maybe 12.04 or possibly even earlier) on this 500GB HDD (not the previous 1TB HDD), anyway most likely done on a BIOS install. In yesterday’s exercise, I had done a something else install and the computer was probably trying to install with UEFI and that might be the problem with this attempt at installing. So this morning, I ran it again doing a complete format and simple install. All seems to have gone well with the exception of still no wired ethernet.
So I am about to shut down, remove this older 500GB HDD and hook up the previous HDD and SDD, but before I do, and while there is only the one brand new fresh install of Ubuntu Mate 18.04.1 running at the moment, is there anything that you would suggest I test now (can only use WiFi if connectivity is desired for any tests)?