UEFI, secure boot on 12.10

[stigman]

My laptop died and I bought a new Toshiba laptop and didn't know about the Win8 secure boot issue and since this is where PCs seem to be headed, wanted to get it working with Kubuntu 12.10. I also bought a new SSD and wanted to load 12.10 and have it boot on the new secure boot laptop. I've pulled the new laptops HDD out and do not want to boot up on that HDD and agree to the Win8 agreement. Apparently even with the Win8 HDD installed, it will not let you get into the UEFI setup before agreeing to the Microsoft agreement.

My question is can Kubuntu 12.10 be installed on my SSD with a UEFI boot partition via a non UEFI desktop computer with the new drive attached to the desktop and booting from the 12.10 ISO usb drive?
I've looked at several UEFI posts on setup and they all say to bootup in UEFI mode and load from there. Since I can't boot from the new computer without saying "yes" to the agreement, I want to setup the drive from another computer and then move it to the new system.

[SteveRiley]

0. On another computer, create a bootable USB drive containing the Kubuntu ISO.

1. Do whatever you need to do to boot the laptop into its UEFI configuration menus. For my ThinkPads, I press F12. Don't know about Toshibas -- check your documentation or Google it.

2. Troll through the menus until you find the setting for Secure Boot. Disable it. Ignore scareifying warnings.

3. Save your changes and power off the machine.

4. Remove the existing hard drive and install your fresh out-of-the-box SSD.

5. Insert the USB drive and press whatever key is required to bring up the boot menu, and boot from that drive.

6. Proceed to install Kubuntu as you normally would. The installer will detect that your machine is running in UEFI mode and create the correct environment. This includes a separate FAT32 partition for the UEFI boot loader. You don't need to manually make this happen.

7. After the machine is running normally, you should remove the last vestige of Windows -- the entry in the UEFI configuration that points to the now non-existent Windows boot loader. Continue reading...

8. Install the EFI boot manager utility:

sudo apt-get install efibootmgr

9. Take a look at the list of UEFI NVRAM variables:

sudo efibootmgr -v

10. Find the entry that contains Windows Boot Manager. Delete it, using the following method:

sudo efibootmgr -b [i]nnnn[/i] -B

where nnnn are the four numbers after the letters Boot on the line containing Windows Boot Manager.

11. Enjoy your new PC.

[Guest]

I recently bought a Toshiba Satellite and had the same issue with the Win8 terms of use junk. I hate MS for these intrusions into the fair use of the hardware we purchased, but they are minimal. You will have to accept the terms of use to get into the bios as far as I could figure out -- you have to get into the bios in order to boot from a USB or cd/dvd ...

The only way I can think that you could get around it is to swap out your factory SSD (or HDD) and swap in a drive with a pre-installed OS to be able to access the bios. Once the bios is changed to boot from USB or cd/dvd before your installed hard disk you can re-install the factory drive and drop your Kubuntu onto it.

Just so you know ... I accepted the terms and conditions and promptly deleted windows from my system. So far I have not noticed that there is any change from the acceptance of this TOS agreement, as the information that I read from it only pertains to the windows software, and not the hardware you purchased.

[SteveRiley]

A computer's firmware loads before the operating system. The procedure I wrote above helps you boot your computer directly to the firmware menus without ever loading the operating system installed on the hard drive. Thus, there is no terms of use screen that you must accept.

[stigman]

thanks Steve your instructions worked great.

I was hoping not to have to agree to the win8 agreement but ended up having to in order to get to the uefi setup.

for those who may have a toshiba laptop I also had to turn the boot speed from fast to normal in order to get it to boot from the usb drive, without this change it ignored the usb drive.