azile19
January 25th, 2013, 09:53 PM
I bought this ultrabook with the intent of wiping Windows 8 as fast as humanly possible so that I could get a real operating system running on it. I had seen the forums talking about UEFI and such nonsense, but there seem to be decent work-arounds, and had at least one first-person tale of successfully giving W8 the boot and getting ubuntu up and running.
That being said, this install seems to have come with a new kind of crazy. First off, finding the BIOS was a problem. W8 posts extremely fast, so Sony gave us a special "assist" button. Pressing this button from the shut down mode turns on the computer into some super strange pre-bios menu. Here, we have options for "Recover or maintain your system", "start from media", "Start from network", "Start BIOS setup", "Shut down", "Start Windows" (blech), "Select Language."
I can go into BIOS from here, which is weirdly bare-bones, and do things like switch between UEFI and legacy, turn off the secure boot option, etc. What is weird is I have options for switching the boot order, but I only have three things listed: External Device, Internal Hard Disk Drive, Network. I would have figured that since I have two USB ports those should have shown up separately.
Ok, so with legacy on, secure boot off, external device boot enabled (it's disabled by default, arg) and the boot order moved around, I can start to boot from my 12.10 thumb drive. I see an Ubuntu screen with the moving dots, it sits there for a long time, then sends me to a shell prompt with the following:
BusyBox v1.19.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.19.3-7ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system
This does seem to be a working shell, although I don't have a lot of options in terms of commands.
Ok, so my guess is that ubuntu can't find my hard drive. Does anyone know a fix?
That being said, this install seems to have come with a new kind of crazy. First off, finding the BIOS was a problem. W8 posts extremely fast, so Sony gave us a special "assist" button. Pressing this button from the shut down mode turns on the computer into some super strange pre-bios menu. Here, we have options for "Recover or maintain your system", "start from media", "Start from network", "Start BIOS setup", "Shut down", "Start Windows" (blech), "Select Language."
I can go into BIOS from here, which is weirdly bare-bones, and do things like switch between UEFI and legacy, turn off the secure boot option, etc. What is weird is I have options for switching the boot order, but I only have three things listed: External Device, Internal Hard Disk Drive, Network. I would have figured that since I have two USB ports those should have shown up separately.
Ok, so with legacy on, secure boot off, external device boot enabled (it's disabled by default, arg) and the boot order moved around, I can start to boot from my 12.10 thumb drive. I see an Ubuntu screen with the moving dots, it sits there for a long time, then sends me to a shell prompt with the following:
BusyBox v1.19.3 (Ubuntu 1:1.19.3-7ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system
This does seem to be a working shell, although I don't have a lot of options in terms of commands.
Ok, so my guess is that ubuntu can't find my hard drive. Does anyone know a fix?