Comment 59 for bug 1766945

I have a multi-partition legacy (BIOS) system. About a year ago, when prompted by software loader, I upgraded from 16 LTS to 18.04 LTS Performed several updates after that (as prompted) but something went wrong with a systemd file (but system still worked well for many months). Recently, I was prompted to do a partial update and it completed happy but, next time I re-booted (selected version through Grub as always have) and got a bunch of red exclamation points and something about software frozen and system would not complete boot. On Dec 13, 2019 I downloaded image of 18.04 from main Ubuntu page and created bootable USB. This allowed me to create my user account and password in order to back up my user data, but the "refreshed" 18.04.3 image still will not boot up via the original Grub (only runs with the newly-created boot USB plugged in). Downloaded the 19.04 image on 12/15 from the primary Ubuntu page, over-wrote the bootable USB, and tried to install it over top of 18.04.3 image and get complaints about EFI boot will not work (of course, since my hardware is BIOS and not EFI). Someone here suggested creating a 200 MB EFI partition anyway and that will be my next step. At the moment the installer shows first a partition for /sda (I take this to be the location of the original boot software), followed by an ext4 partition named /sda4 (where an old mythbuntu resides), followed by an ext4 partition /sda6 (where the 18.04 or 19.04 image is loaded, followed by /sda5 partition designated swap.

So, this bug is DEFINITELY NOT fixed.

I am a software engineer and would like to learn more about booting Ubuntu. Can anyone suggest a good place in the Ubuntu document archive to begin familiarization?