BIOS having trouble finding the OS

When I boot my laptop (Dell vostro-3450) 9 times out of 10 I get the message from BIOS "Operation system not found" and I have to power cycle again. Eventually Ubuntu will load.

I've checked in BIOS and there are no relevant options to configure, its very basic.

I have installed and run boot-repair but the problem remains. here is the output from the boot repair:

The drive (an SSD) is just one big primary partition, and I notice at the end of the report there is this message:

"The boot files of [The OS now in use - Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS] are far from the start of the disk. Your BIOS may not detect them. You may want to retry after creating a /boot partition (EXT4, >200MB, start of the disk). This can be performed via tools such as gParted. Then select this partition via the [Separate /boot partition:] option of [Boot Repair]. ()"

Which seems like it might be the problem, but I don't think its possible to create a new partition at the beginning of the drive without destroying the existing partition.

Is there any way I can fix this without basically reinstalling ubuntu?

Edit:

Output of sudo lshw -c disk

 *-disk description: SCSI Disk product: Multi-Card vendor: Generic- physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb version: 1.00 capabilities: removable configuration: logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 *-medium physical id: 0 logical name: /dev/sdb *-disk description: ATA Disk product: Samsung SSD 850 physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 1B6Q serial: S21HNXBG528568R size: 465GiB (500GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512 signature=d69f4185 *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVD+-RW TS-L633J vendor: TSSTcorp physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/cdrw logical name: /dev/dvd logical name: /dev/dvdrw logical name: /dev/sr0 version: D500 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc

Edit:

I managed to update the BIOS to the latest version, A13 from A05, and this seems to have resolved the boot up issue. I had to create a 32bit windows 7 USB stick to get the bios update utility to work.

1 Answer

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Nov 6 08:42 ata-Samsung_SSD_850_EVO_500GB_S21HNXBG528568R -> ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Nov 6 08:42 ata-Samsung_SSD_850_EVO_500GB_S21HNXBG528568R-part1 -> ../../sda1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Nov 6 08:37 ata-TSSTcorp_DVD+_-RW_TS-L633J_R8126GNB668741 -> ../../sr0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Nov 6 08:42 usb-Generic-_Multi-Card_20090516388200000-0:0 -> ../../sdb
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Nov 6 08:42->wwn-0x5002538d400f800d ../../sda
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Nov 6 08:42 wwn-0x5002538d400f800d-part1 -> ../../sda1

I'm wondering what this is, 2 differend links point to /dev/sda and /dev/sda1

sudo unlink /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5002538d400f800d-part1 

and

sudo unlink /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5002538d400f800d

update your the initrid from current running kernel

sudo update-initramfs -u -k $(uname -r)

and update grub

sudo update-grub