"Hidden" Ubuntu Installation?
 

Well this is new...

So I decided With this preassembled tower I got from Newegg back last year that I would install Ubuntu to the system yesterday. Now my friend is a Linux fanatic and I didn't want to have a literal "command Prompt" styled-terminal like he purposely setup on his laptop with Linux, so I decided to install Ubuntu 16 LTS onto the side of my windows 10 professional OS, (Mostly because of where I'm resided right now doesn't have public internet to recover and reinstall a bunch of shortcuts/temporarily-owned files like that which steam provides.) The computer is practically grounded onto this desk I own; being too heavy a desktop to just carry over to some stupid crap like Starbucks right now. Plus I had seen my instructor have his windows 10 laptop formatted to have Ubuntu on the side next to the original OS, which is where I got the idea to install it in the first place.

So I installed the device in front of my friend, just to be safe, had the installation disk checked for errors, which it said it was perfectly fine. However the first problem arrived when the Ubuntu itself, just for like the literal set up, chugged, and took it's sweet and precious time to load in, let alone install. (Also a side note, I've installed this onto a much weaker laptop, and it ran like butter, so I know some nonsense is going on here. Also I know it's like a "low-task" program, or whatever the term is, and I saw the suggestion file for how much storage they wanted to allocate for the drive, and I was NOT going to set it up with 440 GBs, as it had suggested, I set to 50, but that was just about as low as I could set it.) So the FIRST time it had completed installation, after removing the media, as Ubuntu tasked one to do, the Ubuntu refused to boot to the desktop, and just had some terminal garble at the top left of the screen, no biggie, I'd just reboot the computer. So I manually reboot the PC tower, the Acer loading screen loads normally like usual, but after the like Acer bios loading screen, the screen went black for a bit and I was worried, but after a few seconds it just booted to windows ten, like it always had. Which confused us.

So my friend told me to reboot it in the bios setup/selector to manually boot up the Ubuntu manually, but only the window OS Boot option was there. Confused, I booted to my window's desktop and opened up file explorer to check if for the least that actual driver was even made. Nope, nothing. So I'm confused, my friend is, and it appears that the Ubuntu disk didn't install crap. So we install it a SECOND time. Boot from the disk, load up the Ubuntu, this time a bit faster compared to the slow as hell loading time from the first time, and as it gets to the storage options from set up, it shows a "uninstall Ubuntu and reinstall to system?" option instead of the original install to the side option. So it HAD installed, but, I don't even know what was wrong. Figuring the first time installing had maybe created an error, I clicked onto the reinstall option and reinstalled it. Proceeded to remove the media,(incredibly carefully this time,) pressing enter and after rebooting it just loads to window's 10 professional again. I check the manual boot order again in the bios and in F12 for the manual load and again neither one shows any sign of Ubuntu.

So... I am at a loss. I mean at least it detected the wlan card this time, and I can't exactly check the my full hard drive on windows to see if it actually partitioned some drives for the crap, to which I'm certain it didn't, so I really don't know what to do. My friend is really know help,(even with his knowledge in shell-scripting), and well he believes the OS is like being self aware by refusing the system to recognize a bootable option for Ubuntu or some crap like that. I don't know personally, so that's why I'm posting here.

I'm not truly desperate to install it, but I want to "Program in Vim," I believe my friend had said that was a thing that Ubuntu did. I just hope it's not the disk, I really don't want to burn another one, but I will if I have to.

Thanks for reading, any help would be greatly appreciated thanks.

If you have Windows 10, then you have a UEFI instead of a BIOS. It's the UEFI that's causing the problem. You probably have Ubuntu installed correctly with its bootloader (GRUB) but the UEFI software is refusing to recognise it. My bet is that the "much weaker laptop" you used before without problems had a BIOS. It's worth eliminating two obvious possibilities first.

1) Go into your UEFI setup and check that you have both fast boot and secure boot switched off. They interfere with Linux. Secure boot is a particular pest as it stops anything loading but Windows.

2) You should be able to inspect your efi system partition from inside Windows. It should contain two directories. One will be called Windows and will contain the Windows bootloader boot64.efi. The other might be called grub or Ubuntu and should also contain a bootloader, which might be called boot64.efi or grub64.efi.

Report back and we'll take you further.

Reading the official Ubuntu documentation on dual booting windows/ubuntu uefi is at the page below and should help. Since windows 10 defaults to UEFI/GPT, you need to install Ubuntu UEFI/GPT or you will have trouble booting. The site below explains how you can tell if you are booting UEFI in Ubuntu. Alos, best to use the Something Else (manual) option for UEFI rather than the auto-install Alongside method.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

If you boot the Ubuntu installation media to the Desktop, you can open a terminal and run: sudo fddisk -l which will show some useful drive/partition information.

I had a very successful install of Ubuntu LTS to a modern UEFI secure boot system. Worked fine.

However, you may wish to consider using a free virtual machine. It really makes your life easier if all you want to do is code. A vm frees you from space, wan and lan issues for the most part.

All PCs have a BIOS.
 

UEFI is a boot mode built into the BIOS. All PCs need a BIOS to start up the hardware. BIOS, or legacy, boot simply means NOT UEFI boot.

On another note, Windows doesn't recognize Linux file systems. So you won't "see" the Ubuntu installation from within Windows.

Nope. [U]EFI is firmware - completely re-written and not reliant on the old BIOS code. Inherent limitations in the old code was precisely the reason EFI was proposed.
CSM is an emulation mode - but the underlying firmware is still EFI.

Alright, so I was able to locate the secure boot option on my uefi, from the authentication tab, (my version of it right now is R01-A0,) however I could not locate any sort of "fast boot." I do have my first boot device set up to be windows bootloader, however aside from the "disable," option there's no "Ubuntu," option still, even after disabling secure boot. I have a launch CSM option, Halt on, hard drive disk priority, (I'm about to disable that now; Didn't work either.) I haven't checked for partitions yet btw, I figured it was already implemented from the install disk giving the option to reinstall, but aside from disabling secure boot from the authentication tab, (and the fact I'm trying to do this all before rushing off to work,) I'd say Nothing has changed and the issue still persists. Pressing for the bootloader still hasn't recognized for Ubuntu like my laptop did, so I still don't know.

When I used side by side option on my laptop which is fairly new (2016) it just worked.. In my case the Windows VBR (bootmgr) was the "dominant" bootloader as it would load first as it would prompt me what OS do I wanted to boot into.. Then if I put Linux it would plop me in grub where I had again another option to boot into either Linux or Windows.. My friend is not getting any of these options.. I'm thinking it could be because his Windows bootmgr's BCD (boot configuration database) doesn't have the proper configuration and thus needs either a bootrec /fixboot or bootrec /rebuildbcd command.. Either that or GRUB didn't install properly.. It's also possibly worth noting he upgraded from Windows 7 directly to Windows 10.. Ubuntu/Mint has a digital signature from Microsoft so that it can work with machines that implement secureboot, so that should not be a problem.. My advice is either try those Windows commands in a Windows recovery console, 2) Use a Linux repair CD to fix GRUB, or 3) Delete bootmgr which may possibly cause it to fallback into GRUB (will increase boot times aswell, since you wont have to bootloaders prompting you for what OS you wish use).

* Winload is the second stage of the secondary bootloader, and is executed by the Windows bootmgr

Pretty much everything he said, minus the upgrade from windows 7 to 10, (I had shown him some weird option on my backup and restore tab to which I was attempting to back up the OS on it onto a disk like I had done with my laptop; ) The tower me and him were installing Ubuntu already came with windows 10 professional preinstalled. My laptop on the other hand, came with windows 8, back from late 2012, (I think it was when I got it?) Back when I was pretty much treating it like all trash and basically going through all the works and all the viruses that came with it; I was lucky I was able to upgrade it to windows 10 as it was, the customer support was legitimately trying to trick me into spending a bunch of money I didn't have on another OS key-registered disk since I had not only lost the original slip of paper on it and the laptop had been not registered with Microsoft nor had the files to do the upgrade anyway were completely corrupt/broken somehow. So I'm thankful Microsoft was doing that free window's 10 Upgrade as it was, (I was barely able to access the internal registry key using some txt to bat tricks I saw online.) Now back to the tower, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I do believe it to be like Hal from Space Odyssey right now in the way that even the UEFI bios is refusing to detect Ubuntu to the system. As it's not like I had installed it to the ram as does Mr.2cents does, its clearly there, somewhere in the storage memory.

OH, and on a side note, I have this Image of the sticker that exists on the side of my Tower of the whole product model details of my computer itself, I had taken it a while ago, when I was on a discussion board of why certain newer games on my PC were chugging incredibly hard;

https://pasteboard.co/33mkHbOc8.jpg

So I mean, if anyone want's to look into the release aspect of the model I bought, I mean it's here. If there's anything useful anyway I would need to display from my exterior of my tower, this should answer for it.

There is still a system BIOS.
 

OK, I guess they renamed the BIOS the UEFI.

Just as much as they renamed the Ford the Volkswagen.

They are different firmware specifications.

Harnando, please take a photo of the screen showing the computer's partitions by means of the Windows Disk Management Tool (https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-open...gement-2626080) and post it here. Thanks.

I found the solution
 

Boot repair works wonderfully you just need to copy and paste some commands from the program, environment was a live cd