UEFI just worked

[marshallbanana]

Just got a new laptop which has uefi (& windows 7) and was a bit nervous during the install about whether uefi would work given the number of posts around about problems. Turns out it went fine, no problems at all (installed 12.04 in a dual boot set up with windows). Thought people might like to know uefi can work fine (at least sometimes .

I did a manual partition, installing /home onto the first disk, and root & swap partitions onto the second disk (there are two harddrive, first is a normal one, the second is a small ssd drive). There was a /efi drive already on disk one which I left untouched (I also left a smaller windows ntfs partition on disk one). I told the installer to put the boot loader onto disk one. The whole thing just worked.

[SecretCode]

That's good to hear.

Was there any sign of "Windows 8 ready" on stickers, on the box, or in the order? - I expect not.
And is there any mention of "secure boot" being implemented or enabled in the ... umm ... UEFI control menus (I was going to say BIOS but it's precisely not that)? Because there's nothing wrong with UEFI as such, it's secure boot that creates the issues.

[HalationEffect]

(I was going to say BIOS but it's precisely not that)

I've taken to just calling it firmware settings, or CMOS settings, as both of those are still correct

[GreyGeek]

Was EUFI disabled by default, or did you disable it?

[pauly]

Was EUFI disabled by default, or did you disable it?

Grey Geek I need to know the significance of why you ask this question because, I had problems installing a dual boot on my laptop before. I ultimately used my acronis disk imaging program to convert my gpt disk to an mbr and acronis restored my system image of windows 7 to the new mbr disk. I then installed Kubuntu and it worked. Recently my hard drive failed and samsung replaced my hard drive. They were not able to restore my files because it was giving them a different file system error. No doubt because they were trying to restore an mbr image to a gpt disk. I am going to have to go through it all again and I want to do it right this time. Should I disable efi before the install of Kubuntu? My computer has an option to disable it. Can you help me with this? My pc is supposed to be here tomorrow. I will not be restoring my system image. I am starting from scratch and I just want to get a dual boot properly set up but it was a nightmare the last time.

[SteveRiley]

You cannot disable UEFI. The firmware in a PC is either BIOS or UEFI, not both. Your UEFI configuration should expose a BIOS compatibility option, which makes the UEFI emulate a BIOS.

My suggestion, if you want an easy-to-maintain dual-boot, would be to enable BIOS compatibility mode and to use MBR partitioning.

[HalationEffect]

Your UEFI configuration should expose a BIOS compatibility option, which makes the UEFI emulate a BIOS.

I don't think you can rely on that - the UEFI firmware on my motherboard certainly seems to have no such option... if it's there, I can't find it - and I've looked pretty hard.

Not that I needed to, as the UEFI firmware hasn't caused any problems for me.

[SteveRiley]

Sometimes it's obfuscated behind an acronym. For instance, on my Samsung 700t, the setting is lableled simply "CSM," which I've learned means "compatibility support module." Once I enabled that, the tablet switched into BIOS emulation mode.

[HalationEffect]

Well, I just learned something - apparently my board doesn't have a standard UEFI firmware after all. It's a "Hybrid-EFI", which is Gigabyte's proprietary technology.

http://techreport.com/news/20941/is-...bios-explained

[SteveRiley]

Sheesh. There is really no defensible reason for creating that thing.

Witness the comments following the article: most people don't grok what UEFI is, and Gigabyte's slapping "hybrid EFI" on plain old BIOS with a new boot loader is only going to make the confusion worse.

[HalationEffect]

Yeah, it's a plain old BIOS under the hood, with a mouse-driven graphical interface and support for GPT.

Talk about putting lipstick on a pig...

[oshunluvr]

Talk about putting lipstick on a pig...

I haven't heard that one in years. Thanks for the chuckle

[HalationEffect]

I'm here all week!

[pauly]

Well before I installed I pressed f2 and there was a setting to disable uefi. Not sure what it all is but the disk is gpt and the last time the install gave me a lot of problems, but this time it installed without issue.

[GreyGeek]

Steve more accurately expressed what I was asking ... had you enabled a BIOS compatibility mode, or did that version of UEFI come pre-set to allow a legacy boot disk to work?