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50543
December 29th, 2015 13:00
Dell Latitude 3550: Cannot boot from disk after booting from usb key!
I have installed ubuntu 14.04 successfully on my Dell Latitude 3550 and I have been using it more or less without problems for more than a week. I had completely erased windows, therefore there are no windows partitions on my diskanymore. Due to a problem with the touchpad, I tried ubuntu 15.10 by booting from a usb stick. The system booted smoothly by choosing it from the F12 menu at startup. Everything was fine, including the touchpad.
When I tried to reboot, however, the laptop started system checks instead of booting. The test showed that no bootable medium was found. I tried to repeat the steps from this page in order to (re)create a boot option from the BIOS but when restarting the BIOS still could not boot from the disk.
I had to reinstall the system from the beginning...now ubuntu 15.10 it is...
therefore the question is: When one boots from a USB why the system does not boot anymore? Is there anything obvious that I am missing? Should I never try again booting from an external USB disk?
(this happened during my first day with the laptop, when I tried to reinstall windows 8.1 using the DVD that came with it from an external DVD connected via USB, but I did not pay too much attention to it since I installed ubuntu 14.04 from the beginning)
jmundine
14 Posts
1
January 27th, 2016 17:00
Since no one else responded, I'll give a guess.
Never had a boot to live OS have this problem, but, it's possible that grub or the MBR got messed up. Most likely it tried to install 15.10, instead of just doing the live OS thing.
booting to a live 14.04 usb, and repairing grub/MBR might've done the trick. It's hard to tell; There could also be a mountain of other possibilities, UEFI, BIOS, etc; but I'm shooting from the hip.
But generally, booting to a live OS shouldn't be a problem.