Installing Ubuntu on Asus N550LF as dual boot with W8... or at all

**pehoulihan** · April 5th, 2014

I suspect that won't work for me: The main trouble I've been having with arch is trying to get internet access. Some of the necessary libraries seem to be missing, and pacman doesn't seem to be willing to install from USB. The liveCD is a no-go for the same reason that I can't get the Ubuntu live image going.

I had a hunt around in the /bin folder in arch on the off chance that bootinfo was already installed. It wasn't, but I did happen to find a promising looking utility called bootctl. I ran it and it outputted the following:

/bin #: bootctl

System:
Machine ID: (Long alphanumeric string, let me know if this is important and I'll type it out)
Boot ID: (Long alphanumeric string, let me know if this is important and I'll type it out)
Firmware: UEFI 2.31 (American Megatrends 4.654)
Secure Boot: Disabled
Setup Mode: Setup

Selected Firmware Entry:
Title: Linux Boot Manager
Partition: /dev/disk/by-partuuid/75f1eda7-17aa-485d-9676-45bl2be4592f
File: ¬/EFI/gummiboot/gummiboot-x64.efi

Boot Loader:
Product: Gummiboot 43
Partition: /dev/disk/by-partuuid/75f1eda7-17aa-485d-9676-45bl2be4592f
File: ¬/EFI/gummiboot/gummiboot-x64.efi

Is any of that useful?

**oldfred** · April 5th, 2014

Helps a bit as you have Arch in UEFI boot mode with secure boot off. And are using gummi boot which is another UEFI boot manager which I know nothing about.

Some systems just seem to get locked up. Full cold boot then may work. If laptop remove battery also. And hold power switch down with battery out, to drain residual power to make sure it gets totally reset.

Are you correctly installing Ubuntu to flash drive?
Also instructions for DVD or USB flash drive
http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/get-ubuntu/download
Write image or burn image not copy ISO as one large file to flash or DVD.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/US...lation%20Media
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BurningIsoHowto
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...n/FromUSBStick
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/...-cd-on-windows

**pehoulihan** · April 6th, 2014

"And are using gummi boot which is another UEFI boot manager which I know nothing about."

Well that makes two of us

"Some systems just seem to get locked up. Full cold boot then may work. If laptop remove battery also. And hold power switch down with battery out, to drain residual power to make sure it gets totally reset."

I've seen some suggestions for that before, will that reset everything to factory settings? If so, will my arch boot still exist? Not that it's much use now, but I doubt I'd be able to get it back without help.

I've been using unetbootin to burn the images to my flash drive, it's the one I've seen recommended most on various different tutorials. I'll try the one Ubuntu recommends though (UUI), maybe it'll work better.

**pehoulihan** · April 6th, 2014

I think I just had an epiphany: Both boot options in Aptio are pointing to the same partition on my HDD, just to different .efi files. Arch's one must tell it to do everything else off the SHDD. Maybe I just need to copy the Ubuntu .efi across to that partition, edit it to refer back to the USB stick, then point a new boot option in that direction?

It's either a solution or I'd break everything, not sure which.

**oldfred** · April 6th, 2014

After an install, I have seen users move efi files around.

Users who manually moved efi files around:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2101840

Manually copy efi files to efi partition on flash drive. Toshiba Satellite S855-5378 by ubfan1
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...5#post12599515
On the Ubuntu filessystem, you should have the signed versions of the following: /usr/lib/shm/shim.efi.signed, /usr/lic/grub/x86_64-efi-signed/grubx64.efi.signed, and /usr/lib/grub/x86_64-efi-signed/gcdx64.efi.signed.
Copy them all onto the USB stick .../EFI/ubuntu directory without the ".signed" extension.
Then copy and rename the shim.efi to the USB .../EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi.
Also copy the grubx64.efi to the EFI/Boot/grubx64.efi.
There should be the working grub.cfg in the USB .../EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg

HP 4545s Secure boot off, manually copy files.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2133796
HP Manually renamed files to make it work.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2131886

What I do not fully understand is how an efi boot knows where to go. And some installs with RAID or LVM have had issues and just added another grub.cfg in efi folder. One user posted this:

configfile (hd0,gpt8)/boot/grub/grub.cfg

found that putting grub.cfg into /EFI/ubuntu works, even when grubx64.efi is in /EFI/Boot

Any efi partition on any drive, should be able to re-direct to other installs and boot those.

**pehoulihan** · April 7th, 2014

Good news,

So I tried Universal USB Installer and it gave me a very interesting warning: "USB Device Will not be bootable." I thought that sounded a little suspicious so I decided to try another USB key and, lo and behold, it booted. I've no idea what the problem was with the first one, since it seems to work just fine for everything else, but for some reason it won't boot live images. If anyone else is reading this, Unetbootin won't give you this warning message, UUI will.

I installed UbuntuGNOME to my SSHD, it all appeared to go smoothly. When I restarted there was no boot option for it in UEFI so I ran Boot Repair as you suggested. This added a Ubuntu option to the bootloader, but it doesn't really work for some reason. The windows option now loads grub however so no problems there. I did find that the windows option would only boot properly if I interrupted the boot process, went into settings and booted it from there, for some reason it would encounter a "no such device" error if it tried to boot the option directly. I was able to solve this by disabling Launch CSM again.

Thank you so much for your kind help, even though it turned out to be a trivial problem I never would have worked it out without your advice, and the problems I encountered afterwards were solvable given your suggestions.

**oldfred** · April 7th, 2014

Glad you resolved it.

Just to document how install is you may want to run BootInfo report.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info

If you have no issues, you do not need to post it, just have they documentation on how it is installed.
I run the part of Boot-Repair - bootinfoscript that is just a bash script to document my system as part of my rsync script backup, so I have most current info in backup.