Situation: I installed linux mint 22.2 and was constantly getting kernal panics, so flashed a new USB drive with Linux mint 22.3 and installed it soon froze up with a warning to do nothing except upgrade from a new mirror. I then looked online for for a way to do this and found only useless info that did not work. So I tried to do a fresh install with the option of reinstalling rather than erase disk and install. Then my laptop [Dell latitude 7410] crashed into GNU GRUB version 2.12
with the text minmal Bash-like editing is supported. For first word, Tab lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB lists possible device or file completions. To enable less(1)-like paging. “set pager=1”.
Pressing TAB lists a long command to reenter which does nothing once reentered.
How to I escape this and either reinstall Linux mint 22.3 or Ubuntu both of which I have USB drives for? Oh and my laptop had Windows 11 pro on it to start with. Very tired of the toxic drams with Mint. I have Xsfe (?) installed on another laptop which simply works. And am posting from a Windows 10 laptop.
Welcome to the forums @nelk. Your Dell is fine. You need to get past GRUB and boot from your USB again.
Power off completely, plug in Mint or Ubuntu USB, then press F12 repeatedly as soon as you hit the power button. That opens Dell’s boot menu so you can select your USB directly and bypass GRUB entirely.
Once you’re in the live session, do a full clean install (“Erase disk and install”). After the multiple interrupted installs, the partition table is likely a mess and a clean wipe is the quickest fix.
If the kernel panics come back after a fresh install, check two things in Dell BIOS (F2 at boot):
Secure Boot set to Disabled
SATA mode set to AHCI, not RAID
Also make sure you flashed the USB with something like Balena Etcher since bad flashes cause a lot of issues.
Your solution seems to have worked, but others seemed to have worked and after half an hour or hour of watching youtube crashed into kernal panics. I’ll post tomorrow if this time is different.
My mistake was that I was starting with f2 as soon as the dell logo appeared. This always crashed into the Grub screen. I used Balena Etcher to flash my Scandisk USB drives. F2 was always used first, then system configuration>Sata operation>set to AHCI, then boot sequence enable UEFI, followed by save and exit. The Scandisks were then inserted and the system restarted tapping F12 to enter the boot menu. Once there one is given three options: Ubuntu, scandisk, or partition. The middle one is always the correct one. The it have one into more options one must select Compatibility Mode which then takes one to the boot options to choose ‘erase disk and install’. I only used the reinstall option once which threw me into the Grub Screen.
My installation was successful. There was one kernal panic which announced itself by a sight audio mumble which I ignored. It did not crash the installation and the same video played fine after I dealt with the panic.
I took so long to reply because it took 8 more failed installations before the successful. Balena Etcher was messing up and stopped showing recent downloads that I was attempting to flash. I stopped using Windows to flash them and downloaded both Balena Etcher and Linux Mint 22.3 to my laptop that already had Mint installed to it. Even doing this I had problems because the installations were crashing at the end of the. I had to switch between my two USB drives before I got a good installation. The Drives were complaining that they were not on AMD. This was weird as they were completely reformatted several times. The final installation had one weird weird effect. My laptop shutdown normally, but when opening up automatically started [I actually like this].
I hope that by now you’ve had some success. One thing I like to have around at all times is a removable, bootable Live USB image, and when I say bootable and Live it literally means that such an image can boot right from the source (USB stick or flash drive), and there are quite a few distributions that include this function.
There is one handy distribution that is used MAINLY for this purpose; it’s called System Rescue, located at https://www.system-rescue.org/
That one is particular good at rescuing other systems, usually to fix the boot loader or do a file system check and repair.
Clonezilla is another one for cloning or copying systems or portions of systems that can also come in handy for repair. Clonezilla download | SourceForge.net
Recovery is another interesting project because “recovery is a Live DVD/USB which aims troubleshooting, disk partitioning, system rescue, backup , restore data and desktop. This is a customized version of Debian Live.
It contains : GParted, Clonezilla, Boot-Repair, LibreOffice and a lot of tools like ddrescue, Nwipe, TestDisk, DejaDup and many more” recovery download | SourceForge.net
One or more of these may come in handy for you.