Cannot boot after automatic firmware update failed

Hello,

I am new to Zorin, I have been running 15.2 on a Dell E7470 laptop for a few days. (Working great, I might add!)

I had been letting the software updater run updates as it needed to automatically.

The most recent update downloads included an update for Zorin and what I believe to be a firmware update for the E7x70 series of Dell laptops. I accepted all of those updates and attempted a restart.

However, upon restart, the laptop boots to a Dell screen, then the Zorin splash screen, then back to a Dell screen and hangs. Disk activity ceases at that point.

In the BIOS there are two entries under the UEFI, one is called Linux firmware update, The other one is Ubuntu which points to EFI/shimx64.efi

If I press f12 on boot and pick the firmware update boot option, boot fails and lists three options:

Press F1 key to retry boot
Press F2 key to reboot into setup
Press F5 key to run onboard diagnostics

I put my live USB in and booted from that, attempted a repair of grub, that failed with an error, I have included the link to the pastebin:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/k6HJR5cWT5/

Thanks in advance for your help getting this laptop back up and running!

Is Windows still on this rig or did you remove it? Looking at the spec sheet it states it has an SSD - is that correct? What version of Windows is / was present? Any dell updates usually require Windows to be present which could be the reason why the firmware update failed - or was that coming through the Software Update which seems strange to me.

Swarfendor437 wrote:Is Windows still on this rig or did you remove it? Looking at the spec sheet it states it has an SSD - is that correct? What version of Windows is / was present? Any dell updates usually require Windows to be present which could be the reason why the firmware update failed - or was that coming through the Software Update which seems strange to me.

bought used off eBay, no OS, no license key, but with empty 128 GB SSD
Figured this would be a perfect candidate to try Zorin
It was a clean install of Zorin Core 15.2, single boot
It was not a Dell update, it was an update from the built in software update feature of Ubuntu/Zorin supported by LVFS
It uses the fwupd daemon, which ends up placing an additional EFI boot file resulting in an additional boot option called Linux firmware update
However, when choosing the Linux firmware update option during boot, boot would hang.

I was able to get the firmware to update by using the downloaded firmware .cab files that were placed in the EFI/zorin/ directory, using the Dell built-in BIOS update flash utility.

after it was flashed, I just decided to do a complete clean reinstall again of Zorin 15.2

While I was waiting for this post to be approved I searched on stack exchange and ask Ubuntu etc and could not really find a definitive answer, but my best guess is that there was some sort of issue created when the very first time the laptop attempted to boot into the Linux firmware update EFI file, it failed the boot because it was not plugged into AC mains power (normally required & a good idea for firmware updates). Which was basically my fault to not get it plugged in proper before I rebooted.

Every boot after that first failed boot, while using either the Linux firmware update boot or Ubuntu boot was no such luck, even after running boot repair numerous times with various options set.

Cheers!

Zorinblimp, after re-install, where do you stand with this issue?

I should point out that if the notebook came with SSD you should format to Ext2 - Ext3 and Ext4 are journaling systems. This means continuous writes to the SSD and will shorten its life. You also need to setup TRIM:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... ux-servers

You don't need a swap file on SSD's.

When partitioning manually I never use Large Volume Management (you referred LVFS?) - it creates its own issues!

How I would partition:

1. EFI/ESP boot partition - it may not format to Ext2 - it usually expects Ext4 but it won't be continually written to - 50 Mb
2. 'Root' partition marked as '/' formatted ot Ext2 - 50 Gb
3. '/home' partition formatted to Ext2 - whatever is left after '/'