I am new to Linux. Just recently bought a Lenovo ideapad 110. Created a USB drive with Linux Mint. Was able to boot from USB without problem. Followed the necessary steps from a guide I saw to install Mint. It had me partition the hard drive with creating a swap and all of that. The installation finished and said installation was successful.

The problem is after installation I have no option to boot my recently installed Mint. The laptop boots straight into Windows. I have tried going into BIOS to see if there is something I can change in the boot order or anything. I can find no option to boot into Mint. I ended up deleting the Mint partition.

What am I missing? What did I do wrong?

https://linuxmint.com/documentation/...glish_18.0.pdf

did u read the above link ?

Actually that is exactly the directions I followed. Here is the section of that pdf that isn't working for me though.

"Upon reboot, if you have more than one operating system installed, you should see a
“boot menu”. "

I don't get a boot menu at all. My laptop boots straight into Windows. I have even booted and pressed the appropriate key to bring up the boot menu and there is no option for Mint. I only have the option to boot Windows.

You don't indicate which release of windows you are using so we don't know if you have windows UEFI or MBR. If it is a windows 8 or 10 pre-installed it is likely installed UEFI. If that's the case, the link below gives detailed instructions on installing UEFI if you plan to try again.

http://www.tecmint.com/install-linux...oot-uefi-mode/

Sorry. Laptop came with Windows 10 installed and it's UEFI.

I will try the guide you linked and update

it seems you're not the first:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux+lenovo+ideapad+110
there's so many relevant-looking results...

mmain70,

Assuming that your Windows used UEFI, then try this:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/d...-8-ubuntu.html

Ubuntu alone on Ideapad 110 runs fine here:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2353142

Hey mmain70,

Looks to me like you skipped the boot-loader installation step or that it didn't work. Make sure you boot the UEFI version of your linux distro live ISO and use the UEFI installation procedure for the bootloader (usually GRUB).

Cheers,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I have tried the 2 guides suggested and no luck as of yet. One of the guides tells me to install bootloader to dev/sda and everytime I attempt to do that I get an error telling me to do that would make my system unbootable.

The other guide tells me to install the bootloader to "Windows Boot Manager" which is not an option.

I have even tried both guides with both Mint and Ubuntu and the results are the same.

I even found a guide to use rescatux to fix boot problems and can't seem to make any headway with that either.

Any other options would be appreciated. At this point I am starting to guess that having the option to boot into Linux is a lost cause on this laptop.

Definitely don't do that with an EFI machine. It is the correct choice if you are using the older MBR method. As to the other guide, what options do you see under device for bootloader installation? Are you booting Mint and installing UEFI.

You may need to set something in the BIOS to boot UEFI. If you are also trying Ubuntu, the link below gives a pretty good explanation on dual booting windows UEFI and is the official Ubuntu documentation.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

why not?

apart from that, my previous search indicates
a) that people don't have problems installing linux on this hardware
b) there's a much older model called ideapad U110, so be sure which one it is.

Hi mmain70, and welcome to LQ.

Let me make certain points clear.

Some time ago, every machine was using MBR and things were easy. You would boot your Linux CD/DVD/USB, partition and install, and install GRUB bootloader to /dev/sda (which is device name for MBR).

Now, welcome to the UEFI world. Hard disks are getting ever larger and there was need for a newer system to allow for a greater number of partitions. So, hard disks formatting became GPT (GUID Partition Table) and we have UEFI instead of plain BIOS. The big difference is you don't have Master Boot Record (MBR), but an EFI partition some 500MB-700MB FAT to install bootloaders on. The partition is usually among the first ones on a hard drive (sda1 or sda2).

So, normally, if you booted a UEFI compatible Linux USB, it should have installed Mint on the designated partition along with its bootloader on your EFI partition.

According to your problems, the bootloader installation didn't go well. So, we have to repair this, and I am pretty sure it is totally possible. First, boot into your live USB and check out the EFI partition. Check which one it is and check its contents. You can find partition number from GPartEd.

You could try to boot into live USB, mount Mint partition from hard drive, chroot into it and install grub on EFI partition from there.
Check this out for how to chroot and install grub: https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:sl...slackware#grub (in the example /dev/sda2 is the EFI partition, change it with yours).

All the best.

Thanks for further input. I will try to see if one of these new guides can help. When I am able to give it a try I will update on my progress. This UEFI stuff has definitely made it much harder. The last time I experimented with Linux was on a machine without it and I had no problems whatsoever. Thanks again and I will update.

I don't have an answer to the why not question other than to say when I click the pull down menu for where to install the bootloader it simply isn't there. In other words I am literally not given that option.