Ubuntu

I have no recovery partition, grub or OS

Asked by Denis Bem

I have an early 2008 MacBook. About a year ago I installed 14.04 LTS on it and completely removed OSX (deleted OSX partition and the OSX recovery partition) after which I upgraded to 15.04. The laptop sat around for a while and I decided to boot it up. As it refused to connect to my home WiFi network I decided to do a clean reinstall of 15.04 from the image that I used previously. I booted into Try Ubuntu and selected a to completely format the HDD before installation.

My laptop crashed during the installation process and now I am stuck without an OS and the laptop refuses to see any drive that I plug into it before boot. I've tried various Ubuntu flavors, (16.04, Lubuntu) as well as OSX Lion and Windows 7 and the laptop does not react to anything. After a white boot-screen (I always had that) it only shows a black screen with a flashing "_" in the top left corner.

What should I do? I'm in a bit of a tight spot financially and I would prefer to get the laptop back up and working because I need another machine for home use. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

Can you enter BIOS setup when booting?

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Denis Bem (denisbem) said : 		#2

Since this is a MacBook it's got no standard BIOS, just a number of default keys for things like safe mode, recovery mode, hardware testing, booting straight from a live USB and choosing the boot device. The only thing that functions (somewhat) is choosing the boot device. The only thing it shows when I hold down "c" to do so is a Windows partition which doesn't even exist. The other keys like recovery and so on do not register and I just go to the black screen that I described in the original post.

If I could enter BIOS I think it would've been pretty straight forward but the whole issue is that this is a mac. All my googling just seems to lead to a dead end and as far as I can tell no one has been stupid enough to end up in my position and with my hardware.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#3

Did you MD5 test the ISO you downloaded?
If you burned a CD, did you burn as slowly as possible?
What CPU does the system use?

Thanks

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Denis Bem (denisbem) said : 		#4

Hi Andrew,

I didn't do an MD5 check, will do that now. Didn't burn a CD but made a bootable USB (I'm using an 80GB Seagate HDD). The laptop has a 45 nm "Penryn" 2.4 GHz Intel "Core 2 Duo" processor (T8300).

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#5

You should check the file before you use it. That way you know it is error free and complete.

How did you put the data on the USB, please?

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Denis Bem (denisbem) said : 		#6

I used YUMI 2.0.2.6. I checked the MD5 sums for all of the images I used (Ubuntu 14.04, Lubuntu, Windows 7) and they match.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#7

If you try booting and press the key(s) to select the boot device, are the USB stick and the built-in hard disk correctly shown as options?
Can you try the USB stick on some other computer to verify whether it is correctly working?

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Denis Bem (denisbem) said : 		#8

Manfred,

The USB drive is not recognized by the computer and instead of showing HDDs what the MacBook does is simply show available boot options (not devices), hence it does not display the internal HDD but instead displays a nonexistent Windows system. My regular machine does recognize the USB drive so it is working correctly.

I was thinking that a possible solution might be to format the internal HDD and try installing Ubuntu again but I have no idea how to do it since I can't access anything like a recovery interface or BIOS.

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Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#9

What you describe does not look like a problem related to the Ubuntu installer, but points more into the direction of hardware or basic firmware problems on the MacBook. You might try resetting the NVRAM, see https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204063

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