Xubuntu install on Win7 laptop fails

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 7 Jul 2017 18:00:39 -0700, MR ZenWiz wrote:
>when I rebooted, the machine came up part way in Windows, then began
>flashing through the RGB colors on the monitors. I never saw the grub
>menu or had the option to bring up Xubuntu.  There were no error
>messages, just the colors.
>
>I had to cycle the power and tell it to boot up normally (from the
>Windows safe boot options screen).
>
>This is another first.  I'm thinking of running gparted from my
>gparted flash drive to see what's going on, but I'm hesitant to do too
>much since it is, after all, a work machine, not my own.

Hi,

first mount all partitions, then list the content of all partitions.

ls -hAl /mnt/point_boot/grub/ /mnt/point_2/ /mnt/point_n/

Assuming there should be a Windows that looks good and a Linux,
including /boot/grub/ files, you could install grub like this

    sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/point_boot/grub/ /dev/sda

after updating grub, there likely would be a GRUB menu with a
chainloader to boot Windows, as well as the appropriate Ubuntu entries.
But I suspect you even don't need to run update-grub, grub-mkconfig or
whatever the command is named. I suspect you installed grub to an
Ubuntu partition instead of just /dev/sda without a number, so just
running grub-install might do the trick.

Regards,
Ralf