So, earlier I had Windows 7 on my laptop. I deleted all the Partitions and I think deleted the efi paritition too(which maybe shouldn't be deleted?).
I boot into LM on my Live Disk and automatically installing using the option 'Erase Disk and Intall Linux Mint', I receive this error: 'Failed to Install Grub. Fatal Error.'
I saw it on a LM Forum, and generated a boot report by these commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
apt update
apt install -y --install-recommends boot-info
boot-info
And I get this:
Boot Info Summary
=>No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.
sdb:
File system:
iso9660 Boot sector type: Unknown
Boot sector info:
Mounting failed: mount: /mnt/BootInfo/FD/sdb: /dev/sdb already mounted or mount point busy.
0 os detected
Architecture/Host Info
CPU architecture: 64-bit
Live-session OS is Linuxmint 64-bit (Linux Mint 20.2, uma, x86 64)
UEFI
BIOS is EFI-compatible, and is setup in EFI-mode for this live-session.
efibootmgr -V
Timeout: 10 seconds.
No BootOrder is set; firmware will attempt recovery This session has been detected as 'live' because /proc/cmdline contains (boot-casper)
This session has been detected as 'live' because df -Th / contains overlay
I don't understand this, except one that, I have created a GPT Partition Table from Gparted but this:
No boot loader is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda.
so maybe this could be the issue.
I read somewhere that this could be due to a missing efi partition, so I used 'Something else' during LM Installation and created a 500mb efi Partition and another partition formatted as EXT4 mounted at /. And it works! I don't get the error this time during installation but when I restart to boot into the installed OS, I just see a blank screen, I don't even see the GRUB menu.
I tried installation on Debian too, but I get the same error: 'Failed to Install Grub. Fatal Error.' and I didn't try manual partitioning as it doesn't have Gparted and I'm a bit new.
This is an old laptop from 2011 and the bios doesn't have any option for 'Safe Boot' or 'Secure Boot and also it doesn't have 'Legacy USB boot for EFI systems' setting. The BIOS doesn't have any Legacy or UEFI settings
Most answers on forums, AskUbunu, and SuperUser are about Dual Booting and are very complex.