They say that cell phones float even better than hard drives. I think it's some kind of "technology value relationship"... the more it costs, the better it floats.
Yes, you've been studying... good! BIOS and UEFI are EEPROM (or EEPROM-like... they are flashable for updates) and they are a chip on the motherboard. When booting, their first task is the POST (Power On Self Test), checking what peripherals are attached, RAM is okay, etc... basically a simple hardware checkup. UEFI is somewhat more than that... and probably more than I even know. But the big deal (problem) for Linux users is a specification in UEFI, required by Microsoft to OEM's pre-installing Windows, for a feature called "Secure Boot". I'll probably describe this wrong, or poorly, but I think it is some sort of "digitally signed and encrypted certificate" encoded in the UEFI chip. With Secure Boot enabled, as UEFI passes control of the boot procedure to Windows, it certifies that the hardware has not been infiltrated by malware (known as rootkits). This is at least partly desired because anti-virus programs can't check the hardware or have any knowledge of things before Windows and the AV program starts. I apologize if this is not quite accurate... just trying to give a short summary of this "feature".
You might see the problem already.... Linux developers did not have this "signed encrypted certificate" and it looked like a method to exclude Linux installations. Luckily, most (not all) UEFI settings will allow Secure Boot to be disabled. And that has been the "easy way" for many people to install Linux on newer computers. The big Linux developers (Red Hat, Canonical - who makes Ubuntu, SUSE, and maybe others) have either paid Microsoft for the encrypted certificate or have found workarounds so that many Linux distributions can now install with Secure Boot still enabled. But not all, so there are still many distros that will require Secure Boot to be disabled... and if you have a UEFI that doesn't allow that, then you're out of luck for that distro. Again, just shooting for a short summary here, and may not be exactly accurate.
So, I will be anxious to see Wizard's instructions on using GPT with BIOS as his schedule allows. Besides this little netbook, I also have a desktop that I can use for those tests. And with your willingness to experiment here, you may have time to fix and break your system again many times over before he is ready to begin that lesson.
I think you said you get the GRUB screen before it fails and drops to the (initramfs) prompt... is that right? If so, that gives us some opportunity to try changing some startup options. I don't know all the differences between MATE and Cinnamon, but you might try to put the "
nomodeset" (without quotes) option in like before. At the GRUB screen, hit "
e" to edit, but this time add
nomodeset after the "
quiet splash". I think you need CNTL X or F10 to boot using the added setting (and don't remember if you did that before, or if you just hit Enter it might not have accepted the edit). If that still fails as before, then reboot and get back to the GRUB screen, again "
e" to edit, and add this after the "
quiet splash": "
nouveau.noaccel=1" (without the quotes). Then CNTL-X or F10 to try the boot. If not, we can keep Googling for other possibilities.
All of this above is how Linux frustrates many people (including me sometimes). So remember that you don't have to let this search for a solution trouble you.... it only takes about 20-30 minutes for you to do a clean re-install if you would rather get back to a working MATE system (not sure if Cinnamon will install cleanly for you now, but you could try it also if you want to). When you have a working system again, I would ask if there were other nVidia drivers available? Or just the 304? Sometimes, when there are choices, it might be that a different one will work, even if 304 was the recommended one.
Well, I don't want to go any further until we see if these tricks worked, or what you want to do next.
