Installed Ubuntu on Win8 laptop

JaSauders · 04-22-2013, 11:18 PM

i have an ASUS S56C. It came pre-installed with Windows 8. I disabled Secure Boot from the BIOS and installed Ubuntu Linux 13.04 via LiveUSB flash drive. The installation succeeded, however afterwards I was unable to boot up properly. In fact, the drives just were not being seen whatsoever in the BIOS. I noticed a pattern through experimenting... If I installed Ubuntu on a drive with an MBR table, it installed and booted fine. If I installed Ubuntu on a drive with a GPT table, it installed fine but wouldn't be visible to the BIOS to boot afterwards.

While on one hand, I could use MBR, I'd really like to figure out how to get GPT working. Some discussions with both Windows channels and Linux channels reveals one similarity - everybody believes that the operating system has nothing to do with it, and that the issue is largely between the BIOS and the hardware itself. For what it's worth, I did successfully flash the latest BIOS without issue.

I tried several different partitioning schemes but have yet to find one that worked using GPT as my partition table. I set a 1MiB partition, unformatted, and flagged it as bios_grub, but that did nothing. I also tried to set a separate /boot partition @ 500MB, but that too did nothing. Overall, GPT was an instant road block, whereas MBR worked fine. But.... why? Does anybody have any idea as to why this is or what I can do to get GPT working?

EDDY1 · 04-23-2013, 12:06 PM

This may help you
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFIBooting

JaSauders · 04-23-2013, 02:58 PM

Sometimes things are best left if on auto pilot. I left Ubuntu do the guided partitioning. Once the installation was done, booting up was a success. I installed GParted and checked out what Ubuntu did. Ubuntu had added its own EFI Partition (FAT32, 94MiB in size) at the very beginning of the drive. I ended up redoing it but this time chose manual and selected a 94MiB FAT32 partition to be selected as EFI Boot Partition and bam, that was it. All works well now, whether I use MBR or GPT tables. I am no longer insanely frustrated with ASUS, but I can't say the same for Microsoft. At any rate, we're good.