Someone recently gave me a Dell Latitude E5510 with 4 GB of RAM. It had no hard drive, and they wanted a newer computer anyway, so they gave it to me.
I happened to have a 500 GB laptop hard drive from when I upgraded my wife to an SSD, so I installed the 500 GB hard drive. I now had a decent laptop!
I booted the laptop on several versions of Linux Live — Pixel, Mint xfce 18.2, Mint Cinnamon 19. It ran good on all three. I decided to go with the latest Mint.
After installing Mint to the hard drive, I kept getting an error message everytime I booted: “Error: file ‘boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod’ not found” or “Error: invalid arch-independent ELF magic”. Also, I was at a “grub rescue” prompt (apparently “grub rescue” is a stripped-down version of “grub”).
I downloaded and created a Grub2 boot disk (www.supergrubdisk.org) and booted with it. This brought me to a Grub boot menu. I selected Linux, and I was then able to log into the Linux install on the hard drive.
I found a helpful document at https://www.linux.com/learn/how-rescue-non-booting-grub-w-linux%20 –> you have to include the “%20” at the end of the URL. When I booted with the Grub2 boot disk, I was able to get a Grub command prompt by typing ‘C’. I ran some of the Grub commands in the document. However, I still wasn’t able to get into Linux without the Grub2 boot disk.
I now rebooted without the Grub2 boot disk, but this time I held the left shift key down during the entire boot process. This brought up the “ELF magic” error message, and also told me “press any key to continue”. I hit a key and got into Linux Mint!
I rebooted again, this time without holding down the shift key. I got to the “ELF magic” message and “hit any key”. I hit a key and got into Linux.
Things got better — I rebooted again, not touching anything. About 10 seconds after the “hit any key” message, it automatically went to Mint, without my hitting any key.
In other words, it got better with each reboot. And now that I can log straight in without any problem, I can live with a few seconds of delay during the boot process.
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server