I was helping my friend install Mint on his laptop, it all went well and the installation finished, but the driver for the wi-fi module wouldn’t turn on properly, or something. I assumed this was due to secure boot messing with the drivers, so I tried to disable it in the BIOS (it’s an older laptop, no UEFI). But I have spent the last 3 hours trying and failing to open BIOS, and even GRUB. Nothing I try seems to work.
I tried all the function keys, as well as delete, escape, and enter, and the only thing I found is that F12 opens a boot options menu.
I tried holding and mashing shift throughout the boot procedure to get to GRUB.
I tried using the novo button (it’s a Lenovo laptop) which did open a new menu allowing me to select a “BIOS options” button, but it just rebooted after showing me a few rolling lines of text.
I tried plugging in the installation media I used before, which does take me to it’s GRUB, but choosing the UEFI options option there just causes a reboot.
I tried disconnecting the battery and the CMOS battery and waiting for 30 seconds in hopes of disabling fast boot, which didn’t work.
I edited GRUB config files to change the timeout to 10 and the type away from hidden, which didn’t do anything.
I disconnected the disk in hopes of it defaulting to the BIOS, which works for some laptops.
No option worked. I just cannot access BIOS or GRUB. I really don’t know where to go next, and could use some help.
On all the lenovos here hitting enter when the bios displays the Lenovo splash screen gives a menu that allows you to get at the bios or a boot menu.
You have to be a bit careful cos it’s on a countdown, paused and resumed by the enter key… And you have to get it timed right.
Thing is I don’t get any splash screen, at no point did I. I find that strange too. Enter doesn’t change anything either.
That is odd. However iirc it is an option in the bios.
Fwiw telling grub to uefi boot will not work if the boot device doesn’t have uefi support (and trying to boot in bios mode from a uefi disk fails as well… Been there got the T-shirt)
To get the install media to boot you could try removing the laptop storage…
I don’t have any problem getting the installation media to work, changing the boot device is one of the only meta-OS things I can do right now.
Just thinking aloud here…
Can you boot the install media when the laptop storage is installed?
If so, you can use gparted from the install media to clean the storage device and start from scratch. That might help.
You should be able to tell what mode to install the os in from the boot mode of the install media.