I recently acquired a Dell Inspiron 17 3000.

I was very happy with it and straight away went about installing Linux Mint as a dual boot.

That’s when the problems started.

Windows 10 works perfectly (I use the word in the sense that it did what it was supposed to do albeit very slowly) as did Mint. I had split the main 1Tb disk in two and all was fine except for the boot process.

Switching on from a cold start was generally fine. Mint (my default, of course) ran perfectly. The problem would arise on a reboot. The boot loader would fail and I would either get a blank screen with a GRUB curser – “C:grub>” – or the bootloader showing the two operating systems but neither choice would work and just display an “error: command failed”. A soft reboot (Ctrl+Alt+Del) just brought me the the start of the loop again. A hard reboot (switch off/on) wasn’t much better. Eventually after several soft or hard reboots I would be able to get into either OS.

I tried many things to fix this problem. I had scanned the hard drive from both systems so I knew there were no flaws there. I did a factory restore but that didn’t fix anything. I reloaded Mint. I ran Boot Repair with varying options. I mucked around in the bewildering settings in the Dell Boot Setup. Nothing worked.

I resigned myself to a lot of future frustration but at least I could eventually get into the OS I wanted.

Then I got an email from an old friend in the States – Thanks KirkM – giving a link to the solution.

So, for my own future reference –

sudo cp /etc/grub.d/40_custom /etc/grub.d/06_notpm
sudo bash -c 'echo "rmmod tpm" >> /etc/grub.d/06_notpm'
sudo update-grub

I’m naturally wary of code like this just copied off the Web but frustration got the better of me. I tried it.

It works!