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263885
February 24th, 2015 15:00
Reinstalling Ubuntu 14.04?
I received a Precision M3800 with Ubuntu 14.04 preinstalled. I tried upgrading to 14.10 and it broke some stuff (I should have seen that coming...), so I'd like to reinstall Ubuntu 14.04, i.e. revert it to the factory settings. What's the best way to do this? Is there a Dell-specific ISO somewhere that I can download? Or, should I install the vanilla distro from Canonical and then install some Dell-specific packages or something?
Thanks!
--Doug
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Finalfantasykid
37 Posts
2
February 25th, 2015 00:00
I noticed that on the bootloader there is an option to reset to factory settings. So assuming that you didn't also break the bootloader you should be able to still do this. Once you turn the computer on as soon as you get the purple screen press the ESC key, this will show you some options for booting, and one of them should be something like "Reset to Factory Settings" or something like that.
dougorleans
5 Posts
0
February 25th, 2015 06:00
Yep, that worked great, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!!
cfhowlett
8 Posts
0
February 27th, 2015 00:00
Hi Dougorleans:
I also just purchased a m3800 Precision Developer Edition. After clean installing UbuntuStudio 14.04.2, I seem to have lost part of my sources and, perhaps worse, the "restore to factory settings" and "Dell diagnostics" options.
Could I possibly trouble you to share two of your system files that I can use to rebuild my system? If you would open a terminal and run these commands:
more /etc/apt/sources.list > sources.txt
more /boot/grub/grub.cfg > grub.txt
Please email the two resulting text files to seattlechaz@hotmail.com
Thank you in advance!
dougorleans
5 Posts
0
February 27th, 2015 09:00
Sure thing. I also posted them publicly here: gist.github.com/.../9f2b212d4bdb933dcdb4
justfred
5 Posts
0
March 4th, 2015 10:00
Hi,
I just received my M3800 with Ubuntu 14.04 pre-installed from Dell. However somehow at first boot after entered the initial setup like wifi, timezone, keyboard and admin user details the installer crashed.
I probably have a semi configured(*) machine with OEM as admin user and I had to guess the password (oem :emotion-1:). I'd like to try to re-run the first boot setup which is probably achieved by factory reset.
I tried the esc as you mention and I get the following (GRUB) options :
Ubuntu <- just boot as usual
Advanced options <- which is booting normal or in a save mode
Setup <- which gets me to a BIOS setting environment after which the machine boots as it was.
Am I missing something ?
(*) at least I hope that e.g. some better video drivers would be installed/configured because :
at the high resolution of 3840x2160 and a rescaling menubars and titles [in the Display setting] of 2 (to have something readable) the screen is all messed up. Setting rescaling to 1 works but I need to use a microscope to read. [so this may be an Xorg issue rather than a driver issue]
however running the Unigine "Heaven" graphics benchmark ( https://unigine.com/products/heaven/ ) results is a white screen.
cfhowlett
8 Posts
0
March 4th, 2015 19:00
Assuming your Factory Restore partition remains in place, it should be possible to launch it from the GRUB prompt. I've not figured out how to do this yet, and DELL hasn't provided any guidance. You COULD download Ubuntu 14.04.2, create a boot USB and do a clean install, but, well, see my issue above in this thread. If you go this route, MANUALLY install and do not touch the DELL OS or DIAGS partitions.