Hello All,

I have bought an Acer Aspire E15 with Linpus Linux pre installed. Now I cannot do much with this, so I created a disk with Linux Mint 18 Sarah (Cinnamon) and tried to install it on the new laptop. Everything seemd to be going fine until at the end when the program asked me to remove the disk and start up the laptop again.

The only thing that happened when I started it up again was a message appearing saying:
NO BOOTABLE DEVICE

And that was it. Cannot do anything anymore, apart from if I put the CD back in I can work on the Linux mint from the disk, but that is not really what I wanted.

Does anyone have any idea on how I can solve this problem?
Thank you very much in advance

After booting the Mint DVD to install, did you change the boot priority in the BIOS back to boot from the hard drive?

And did you check that you have grub properly installed? You say it's a new laptop. Does it use a BIOS or a UEFI chip? If it's a UEFI, there will be a EFI system partition which you can mount on /boot/efi when booted from the CD, and check whether there is a grub bootloader file in there.

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No I probably did not. What should I do now?

Hazel

Sorry but I am a newbie here and pretty much on linux so could you explain a bit more please?

It can be done but it's tricky. Basically, you need to boot from your CD, mount the hard drive to make it accessible and "chroot" i.e. change your root file system from the CD to the hard drive. Then you can install grub just as if you'd booted from the hard drive to begin with.

Let's break that down. To mount the hard drive, you open a terminal and use the mount command.
I'm assuming your new system is installed on the second partition of your hard drive with the EFI system partition on sda1. If that isn't so, change sda2 as appropriate. The "-t ext4" bit tells mount what kind of filesystem you've got on that partition and /mnt is just a convenient directory to mount it on.

You also need to set up some special dynamic directories. Here is some code to do it, adapted from the Linux From Scratch book.
It's a good idea to list /mnt/dev and /mnt/proc at this point to ensure that they are fully populated with files. Then:
This assumes that sda1 is your EFI system partition. Check at this point that it is mounted as required.
Finally chroot:
This will cause /mnt to become your new root partition /. Then:
If I were you, I'd do it in stages and check each stage for success before going on to the next. Remember nothing irreversible happens until you do the grub-install. Don't do that until you're sure you've got the other steps right. You're not in a hurry, are you?

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Does it boot to dvd still?

Sorry for the late reply

The main problem is that I cannot open a terminal on this laptop. I can either have the CD in and start up linux via that....or, I get the message No bootable device and can't do anything.
Thanks for all the help though.
And no, I am not in a hurry.

I assume that booting from the CD takes you to a graphical desktop. From here, you can simply open a terminal using the desktop menu.

An alternative that sometimes works is to press ctrl+alt+F1. This will take you to a text console, but you will have to log in there. There may be instructions on what name and password to use. For example, the AntiX installation disk provides a console login prompt which tells you to log in as root with password "root". I suspect Mint will be less helpful as it's targeted at newbies, so you might prefer to just open a graphical terminal.

And how do I open the graphical terminal? Because it asked for login (I typed root) and then it asked for password, butI have no idea what that might be.

Booting a Mint DVD should not show you a login page but just boot directly to the Desktop without any password. Try hitting the enter key leaving the password blank.