OK I'm back so I'll outline our best option at the moment and that is chrooting with your DVD into the install itself. We can take as a given the following has been effected, if not accurate, correct me:
- You have a working medium, the DVD-R, which carries a closed session of a burned Ubuntu 16.04.3 'Xenial Xerus' with a Unity Desktop Environment, 64-bit
- The .iso from which you burned the DVD was verified, although I haven't asked you, unless I missed it, how you verified it?
- The install has completed, and when you reboot your htpc, you get a message about
-
... asking for a boot device or to install a boot device and restart the computer after OS has been installed
chroot aka ChRoot simply involves us using an Ubuntu Live medium to go into the Ubuntu install that's not working and do good voodoo just as if we were working within a working install.
We can often fix it this way. If not, we go to plan e) None of the above, lol.
The message you're getting indicates that Linux agrees the install is there, but it cannot find where to boot from. (Likely)
INSTRUCTIONS
1. Boot the DVD, and choose "try Ubuntu"
2. When you are in, go to Settings (cog icon on launcher at left) and choose Brightness and Lock
3. There, choose Never for Dim Screen, then exit
4. Go to Dash top left corner, start to type in Terminal, open Terminal
5. Icon will appear in Launcher, right click it and choose Lock to Launcher
6. In Terminal type and enter the following, and examine the output
Code:
sudo fdisk -l #that's a lowercase L
and
sudo blkid # that's like block ID
and
df -Th
These will give you "The State of the Nation".
It is likely you will have your small r root as /dev/sda1, that is your partition full of system files.
What I am particularly interested in is if during the install process you chose somewhere specific for your bootloader to be installed, eg /dev/sda2 or whatever.
If done as a separate partition, we will factor that in later. It would be a very small partition, perhaps 300MB or less, formatted as vfat, that is FAT32, not as EXT4, the native Linux format. It will be referred to as ESP and/or EFI.
I'll proceed, until I need to adapt, or not.
Once we have got where the install is, we can type in the following:
7.
Code:
sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt
... where XY is X a letter and Y a number eg sudo mount /dev/sda1
You will just be returned to the prompt unless something is wrong.
8. ONLY if you have made a separate
boot partition will you then enter
Code:
sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/boot
Note with this and 7. the space between mount and /dev and ..XY and /mnt - The output from Step 6. will reveal whether Step 8 is needed.
9. We now need to mount some virtual filesystems, in order (one includes a subfolder) as follows
Code:
for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done
Note the spaces and the small I's (ayes)
Next we actually chroot, fasten your seatbelts.
10. sudo chroot /mnt
Grub is not installed properly so we'll try this (with no number, it is just to the partition)
... that is likely "/dev/sda", no number. We don't need "sudo" with this because when we chrooted, you became captial R Root and sudo is unnecessary.
Now Grub is hopefully installed. So we will update it.
This may take a few secs and spool off some length of output.
If no errors were reported, we are finished as chroot, so we will exit it, by pressing Ctrl-d, it will show "exit" and return you to the DVD's Live prompt.
Hold your breath and type with or without "sudo"
You may be told to remove the medium and press Enter.
Let me know how you go.
Wizard