[SOLVED] Booting install CD when uefi and secure boot are enabled

[oldfred]

It is gparted or parted that makes the efi or ESP partition look like it has a boot flag. That is only because users know boot flag is for booting.

It really is a gpt partition code that defines efi partition. Some UEFI systems have efi boot files in another recovery/data partition and may somehow move boot flag to convert data partition and boot into recovery.

In GPT fdisk, ESPs have a type code of EF00. In libparted-based tools, you mark the ESP as such by setting its "boot flag." Note that the libparted "boot flag" means something entirely different under MBR, and you should not set the "boot flag" on any OS partition under GPT!

And in actuality it is a long GUID code that defines partitions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

Pastebin does not seem to be working. May be due to pending upgrade to forum.

[squakie]

While we're at it here, since my last try again with a vm running 12.10 and still being extremely slow (still couldn't get 3d going and I understand something about 12.10 not having 2d so it uses the CPU [llvm?] versus the GPU. So, do you know if 12.04 is the same? If not perhaps I can at least Ubuntu in a vm for now until I try to figure the rest out more. BTW - is there anyway to test the UEFI "stuff" in a vm - so that I could have the logical disk looking like a UEFI disk and then try to install Ubuntu within the vm? I don't believe it would be possible at this time, nor do I think you can dual-boot in a vm, but I thought I'd ask anyway. It would stop me from having to completely reload my disk image every time something screws up.

I'm hoping 12.04 in a vm works without llvm - if so I'd sure like to have someway to get to Ubuntu without having my EFI stuff questionable.

Thanks again!

[squakie]

BTW - my laptop seems to indeed have an EFI partition at the very start of the disk. I'm thinking part of what I've been doing is messing that up some how. I've done more reading on the Windows 8 and another OS "thing" and see this can be difficult to get working (thanks to makers of another OS whose name I won't use because we're not supposed to talk bad about them in the forum ). I am also seeing where what the vendor does to implement all of this on their PCs just throws another ripple in the ocean. I hope someday there will be a set of REAL standards (like ANSI) so that these things are indeed all standard in how they are implemented so that other OSs don't have to jump through hoops to install and use it along with Windows 8. It's becoming clearer to me that while there is a definition for all of this there are still no standards on the vendor's side. I hope that day comes soon (as I'm sure everyone is dealing with this does!).

[squakie]

I got 12.10 64-bit installed in a vm and it is running much better now. I still have some kinks in it (mouse very erratic, losing the unity panel, the top bar disappeared so now I have to force power off via VirtualBox instead of shutting down Ubuntu). I have a ton of updates being downloaded right now, so I'm waiting until they complete so I can see where things stand again and then work from the "fixing" things.

One things I can't quite figure out - the virtualboxlinux additions. I can't find anywhere to download them - I thought that the Oracle site worded it to sound like there is only a single download to do Windows, Linux and Mac. So, since I had already downloaded it for my XP vm, I tried adding them in the ubuntu vm but it says the file isn't found on the CD when I don't have a physical CD in the drive or a logical drive assigned. But at least I do have 3d acceleration apparently working.

[gnueliafnak]

Hi, I'm a new user to Ubuntu as of yesterday. I mainly use it as my HTPC in my living room.

I installed 12.10 with secure boot enabled yesterday on my Lenovo. I just hit F12 and it brought up the boot from screen which allowed me to select a legacy device to boot from.

[squakie]

Hi, I'm a new user to Ubuntu as of yesterday. I mainly use it as my HTPC in my living room.

I installed 12.10 with secure boot enabled yesterday on my Lenovo. I just hit F12 and it brought up the boot from screen which allowed me to select a legacy device to boot from.

Yeah - I've been able to use the BIOS boot menu via F12 - what I'm trying to do is get a true dual-boot on a UEFI enabled PC with secure boot on.

[squakie]

if you're still following, OldFred, I'd like your opinion on this I extracted from this post from another site on the net:

2 Answers
activeoldestvotes
up vote17down voteaccepted
OK, it was a very involving process, but I solved my problem and everything works together just as it should.

I'm documenting the solution for everyone:

1. One must begin with GParted Live and create a fresh GPT partition table. This will wipe everything on the HDD resp. SSD. Then one must create a small 8 MB 'unpartitioned' partition and flag it with 'bios_grub'. Afterwards, one creates a 100 MB fat32 partition labeled 'EFI' and flagged 'boot'. (This is the modern and more transparent equivalent of what the MBR used to do, see here for reference.)
2. Optional: Install a Linux distribution that works correctly on GPT UEFI systems from USB. I don't know which ones do. I installed Chakra Linux to try it out. While installing make sure to mount the 100 MB fat32 as /boot/efi. Do the rest as usual. I left some unformatted room for Windows 8 (300 GB), created a linux-swap of 1 GB afterwards, created an adjoining ext4 (25 GB) and mounted it as /. After installation it will not boot, but we will fix that with ease. Do the entire step again for installing more distributions.
3. Install Windows 8 in the unformatted space we left in the previous step. It will automatically identify the EFI system partition, create a MSFTRES, and a NTFS where it installs itself. After installation we can only boot into Windows, but we will fix that later.
4. Ubuntu will fix it all. While installing select the 100 MB fat32 and change it into 'use as efi'. Create an ext4, install Ubuntu. Upon rebooting we are presented a nice working GRUB2 which detects Ubuntu and Chakra Linux.
5. Now we will configure GRUB2 to detect Windows. It is a known bug, however, Rasmus Pedersen's workaround is functional. Be aware of a typing error he made: It is /etc/default/grub without an s instead of /etc/defaults/grub. When writing "chainloader (${root})/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi" I wrote /EFI/ in capitals just to be sure. When done this will present us a working GRUB2 with a working Windows 8 entry.
6. GRUB2 does not look very nice with so many boot options and it is not in my preferred order. Thus I install and use grub-customizer in Ubuntu as shown here. I configure it so to hide the memtest, the recovery and the old kernels, and I reorder it to put my custom script with Windows on top. Done.

share|improve this answer
answered Apr 23 '12 at 9:46

Here's the info from Rasmus Pedersen's work around - note that he changes things a little by adding the info on booting Windows correctly.

Rasmus Pedersen (rasmuslp) wrote on 2012-04-07: #7
I have solved this temporarily.
The GRUB menu can be unhidden by commenting out the two lines regarding GRUB_HIDDEN in /etc/defaults/grub and running update-grub as root.
Next, the entry for windows can be manually added by appending the following lines to /etc/grub.d/40_custom:
menuentry "Windows" {
search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root YOUR-EFI-PARTITIONS-UUID-HERE
chainloader (${root})/efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
}
Find your EFI partitions UUID by running 'ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid/'. As the EFI partition is a FAT32 partition, the UUID is of the form XXXX-XXXX. If you have more than one FAT partition, you can verify if one is the EFI partition by checking the partition map with gdisk (not installed by default). Run gdisk on the device, 'sudo gdisk /dev/DEVICE', press 'p' to print the partition table, and then 'q' to quit. DON'T make any changes to the partition table. The EFI partition will have the code type 'EF00' and most likely a name/label that says it is a EFI system partition.


Rasmus Pedersen (rasmuslp) wrote on 2012-04-07: #8
Regarding #7 > Then you ofcourse need to run 'update-grub' after editing the 40_custom file for this change to take effect.

[oldfred]

Your first link added a huge complication by using btrfs not ext4. Some still cannot use btrfs with BIOS boots.
BTRFS, not ready for prime time
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2111487
EXT4 Still Leads Over Btrfs File-System On Linux 3.8
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...rfs_ext4&num=1


Some UEFI systems have to be installed in BIOS mode with a bios_grub partition to get grub to install correctly. Some Samsungs should only be BIOS mode until Samsumg fixes its UEFI.
Then Boot-Repair can convert to UEFI by uninstalling grub-pc and installing grub-efi.

Windows has its own requirements for files in UEFI/gpt installs.
Microsoft suggested partitions including reserved partition for gpt & UEFI:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx
Older Windows info on gpt - 2008 updated 2011
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wind.../gg463525.aspx
Windows technical info on gpt and GUIDs
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/wi...sktop/aa365449
Order on drive is important:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microso...rved_Partition


I prefer to manually edit entries in 25_custom or 40_custom. But some prefer the gui with Grub Customizer.

[squakie]

I reinstalled Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit again as normal for dual boot with Windows 8, then tried that manual edit of the 40-custom file. My entry name shows, but it still says something about can't load image - the error goes away so fast I can't get it written down.

I'm glad you thought the first part was a bad idea as I don't know how I could repartition the entire drive like they suggest, and after Ubuntu is installed load Windows 8. Just didn't seem like a good idea, especially when all I have are the Windows 8 recovery disk images I created from Dell's utility on my laptop. It just would have been a no-win for me. I was curious about the things you mentioned but really just kind of let them go when I determined I couldn't do what they wanted anyway.

I suspect that maybe there is a problem with boot flags as you mentioned previously. I seem to have more than 1 partition it has marked as bootable, even though it doesn't mean the same now. Going to check some more on that tonight. I'm kind of hoping that as my patience allows to keep digging at this until it works. Then I could at least say for this one little teeny Dell product you can do "this" (like anyone else will probably need it anyway ).

Thanks again!

[Jay_E]

Hey there,

About booting windows....
May I suggest:
1) Is windows still bootable? To find out:
- burn an bootable CD that has the Gparted (partition editor)
Like http://www.sysresccd.org/
You can run gparted (as root) from ubuntu - but having a separate, bootable cd is useful.
- boot this and run gparted.
- Check to see if the bootable flag is still on for the windows partition. If not, set it
under manage flags.. Its safe to do this

About not seeing the grub menu
Maybe the timeout is too short?
I set mine to 20 seconds
This setting is in /etc/default/grub
you probably need a sudo for editing
mine is
GRUB_TIMEOUT=20


About setting what is the default boot
I used startupmanager
to do this. The numbering starting-with-zero and starting-with-one changed
so I let the app deal with it

About your approach
Good approach - just go ahead and try it.
Be prepared for bumps in the road and bear traps in the tall grass.
(Its not that bad.)

I have a new motherboard and AMD 64 on a custom built frame.
I could not get 12.04 to boot from the hard drive.
I went to Debian while I'm waiting for the dust to settle and to see if anyone had
answered my posts that had tried with my set of hardware.

Good luck
Jay