After a failed general software update this new laptop's factory-installed 14.04 is sickly.

If I M-for-manual-recovery past the "An error occurred while mounting /boot/efi." message I get on startup I get to a screen with messages "File system check or mount failed.", "A maintenance shell will now be started.", etc. Entering the root password, forcing a shutdown, then starting-up again takes me to a GNU GRUB version 2.02 screen with options including "Restore Ubuntu 14.04 to factory state". The other options are "Ubuntu" (the default), "Advanced options for Ubuntu" and "System setup".

I haven't tried restoring to factory state yet as I'd be interested to see a Boot-Info report first, but I'm having problems getting to this as discussed in two other related questions.

So it does, after all, appear that it's possible to restore the OS to as-shipped state and there's a Dell recovery partition. I haven't yet worked out how to look at partitions, etc in Ubuntu so I may remove the HDD and have a look with some Windows tools I'm familiar with.

3 Sorted by: Reset to default

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