Hit a bit of a snag with moving to Linux. For some unfathomable reason my shitty BIOS isn't recognising the installation. I formatted the drive correct during install and the BIOS is UEFI so I have no idea what the problem is. It sees the drive, but it's not seeing the OS installation.
Did you make the partitions manually or did you use the default settings? And what kind of partition is it? EXT4 or BTRFS? The requirements are a bit different.
Manually, following the exact same process I've done for another machine I have. GPT partition table, FAT32 for the EFI, EXT4 for root and EXT4 for home. I also have a swap partition set up.
If it's exactly the same process then I have no idea what's wrong. Are you using more than one HDD or SSD? And if that's the case are you 100% sure the boot order is the right one? Because that can happen easily, especially if you physically disconnected and re-connected them.
And do you really need the swap partition? Because I haven't used one in years. Unless it's for a laptop these days people normally use a swap file or zram.
Probably not, but I vaguely recall hearing swap partitions perform slightly. Anyway I resolved the problem with booting. It turned out when I booted into the Mint installer from USB there were two options: USB or UEFI. I think selecting USB messed up the install. Re-installed and it's working now.
At this point if I can't figure out what the problem is I'll just have to try again but everything is correct as far as I can see. Partitions are correct, table is GPT, boot partition flags and boot loader is definitely installed. Baffled.
I don't know if this is the problem but when I booted from my USB stick where the Mint installation is I *may* have selected "USB" instead of "UEFI" from the boot options. Maybe this messed up the installation? I'll start over just to be sure.
Looks like that was the problem. The good news is Ubuntu now shows up and I can boot into Mint. The bad news is booting from Windows from grub is borked and I have to manually change boot order to get back into Windows. I'll try updating grub and seeing if I can fix that or it's gonna be tedious.
No idea what's up with grub not being able to boot into windows but that's a problem for another day. Mint's going to be my daily driver from now on as I doubt I'll need to log into Windows that often anyway unless I need to export anything specific. I'll gradually move my stuff over time.
If you're dual-booting, just make sure Windows doesn't mess up the bootloader when it updates. It's been known to be extremely unfriendly to multi-OS systems. Personally I went with a full Linux install with a Windows VM in case I need it, but that obv doesn't have the same compatibility as native.
Yeah no worries, I'm aware Windows can screw up the boot loader. I installed Linux to a completely separate drive. I might go the VM route myself and just use the Windows drive for extra storage if there's only a few apps I really need access to. I've not really messed around with VMs before.
Be sure to turn off secure boot in UEFI/BIOS.
Thanks for the suggestion but I just checked and it's already off.
Try reinstalling the OS with the suggested encryption this time. Make the password the same as your admin. Which Linux are you trying to install?
None of that should have any effect on OS detection. Linux Mint.
When you boot from the USB installer, what does the target drive look like? Try using Disks from the USB installer, see if it's what you expect it to be. OEM Windows leaves behind tricky bits to enable recovery
All sorted now. It was a misstep during installation. When I booted into the USB installer for Mint I selected USB instead of UEFI as the boot option. It messed up the installation somehow.
Nice! Good work :) I'm glad you sorted it out