Unable to boot after fresh install

Installation
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Hi there, I’ve been using Budgie for many years and love it. After several upgrades and a few errors popping up I decided to start afresh and re-install 24.04 LTS via USB. All seemed fine until I restarted and received the message ‘Boot Device Not Found - Please Install an OS’. I have boot set to Legacy rather than UEFI (that seemed to fix an early boot failure when I first installed Budgie). After a few more failed attempts I tried installing an earlier version - 22.04 LTS - opting to wipe the drive as part of the install. Same error. I then installed 20.04 LTS and it worked! My laptop is an old HP 840. I ran a check on the drive and no errors were found. Any idea why both 24.04 and 22.04 would not boot but 20.04 did?

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Hi @paulreb!

Progress often leaves old equipment behind.
However, the problem with your computer seems to be well known. Try UEFI mode and follow these instructions (among others), which seem to have worked for one user:

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Thanks @jlb for your quick reply! I tried switching to UEFI with no luck. The only solution so far is to install 20.04 and upgrade from there. Glad I found a solution but it seems odd that the problem only appeared with the two most recent LTSs.

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I’m glad you were able to upgrade — better than nothing.
To clarify, I think the installer must have changed over the versions and Ubuntu 24.04 is no longer immediately compatible with legacy mode, unless you make some adjustments before starting the installation:

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To double check, by this you mean you:

  1. switched the BIOS to UEFI mode.(important: BIOS needs to be in UEFI mode PRIOR to installation or system will fail to install correctly and will likely be unbootable.)
  2. booted the Ubuntu Budgie 24.04.1 LTS USB in UEFI mode (be careful, boot menus often list two options, a ‘plain’ / legacy USB option and a USB + UEFI option - don’t get them mixed up because an install with the non-UEFI boot menu option may lead to a install that refuses to boot! This is a separate issue from enabling UEFI mode in the BIOS.)
  3. Installed the OS as usual using the install wizard.
  4. Rebooted while keeping the BIOS in UEFI mode.

I go over this only because UEFI installs are a little more tricky, easy to make a mistake in one of these steps, especially the first two.

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Thank you @cinnamon that’s a level of detail about installing and booting I was unaware of. It will likely not surprise you that I did not ensure that all of those steps were aligned. Next time.