Boot options not appearing after Esc and all F## keys held when powering up laptop
I have a MacBook Air 2015. I've run Ubuntu 20.04 with no problems for several months now. This morning, after installing regular Livepatch software updates, the wifi option disappeared from the bar at the top of the screen.
Having anticipated this, I checked and surely enough, I see "No Wi-Fi Adapter Found" in Settings after bringing up the hidden Wi-Fi tab from the search bar.
After a very frustrating afternoon trying to reinstall the network driver offline (don't bother, all the solutions I found couldn't work because of incorrect file paths or missing installations and I can't figure out what's wrong either), I decided to simply reinstall Ubuntu 20.04 on my laptop from a live USB.
I can't enter the BIOS settings when booting up, and after that Ubuntu boots to a black screen. Holding down (or simply tapping once) the Esc key and all the F## keys simply makes lines of code scroll ridiculously quickly past the screen, as if something is being verified.
Again I checked for all kinds of solutions regarding BIOS booting issues and nothing seems to work. Rebooting into UEFI settings does not work and neither does changing grub settings to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash reboot=bios" seems to work either.
Screenshots of booting up process, where I pressed F2:
I need answers, preferably for an offline solution. I'm stuck in a situation where my laptop can't install a new network driver, and I also can't reinstall an OS from a bootable USB.
32 Answers
For those with other computers with the same question comes this answer:
Access Boot Menu
To access Boot Menu on your computer you will need to hit different keys (or combination of keys) depending on your computer type. Here is the list of possible keys you may have to press depending on your PC:
| Device | Key Combination | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Acer | Esc, F12 or F9 | F12 key most likely |
| Apple | ⌥ | the key is also known as Option or Alt |
| Asus | F8 or Esc | |
| Compaq | Esc or F9 | |
| Dell | F12 | |
| eMachines | F12 | |
| Fujitsu | F12 | |
| HP | Esc or F9 | |
| Lenovo | F8, F10 or F12 | Other possibilities: Novo button or Fn + F11 |
| Samsung | Esc or F2 or F12 | For ultrabooks from Samsung disable the fast boot option in BIOS/UEFI. See next section. |
| VAIO | Esc, F10 or F11 | Other possibilities: Assist button |
| Toshiba | F12 |
... I held down the Opt key.
And it worked.
