Hello:
I have a new laptop, an Asus X551MAV-RCLN06 with Windows 8.1 pre-installed. I am trying to install Linux Mint 17 (MATE edition), which is based upon Ubuntu 14.04. My goal is a dual boot system. I have tried several times, and Mint seems to be on the hard drive, but I cannot get the Grub menu to appear. On most attempts I used the Boot-repair program afterwards but I could not get grub to reinstall. Current status of the system is here: http://paste2.org/nyPZXW7N.
What I have done:
1. Shrank the C: drive the maximum recommended amount using the Windows "Disk Management" utility.
2. Disabled "Secure Boot", and "Fast Boot" in the UEFI BIOS.
3. Enabled CSM (Legacy mode), also in the BIOS, thus disabling EFI.
4. Burned the Mint 64-bit edition to a USB drive.
5. Booted from the thumb drive and installed Mint. Note that the only way I could boot from the USB stick was to implement steps 2 and 3, above.
a. In consecutive attempts I have created both Primary and Logical partitions for the root (/), /home, and BIOS-EFI partitions. In the last attempt, I created a 110MB Primary and formatted it FAT32 with GParted. Then booted from USB, and made sure I marked this partition (/dev/sda6) as the place to install the bootloader. In previous attempts I had marked /sda1 without success.
b. I have run the Boot-repair program after booting from the USB stick but have been unable to repair (or activate) Grub. I used first the default option ("Recommended repair"), then tried to pick out the appropriate options in the advanced menu, with the latest result shown in the pastebin link, above. It has displayed some troubling error messages about dependencies and not being able to reinstall grub in /dev/sda6.
UEFI BIOS setup - there is an option in the BIOS (Aptio Setup Utility to be precise) Boot menu menu to prioritize boot devices. Called "Boot Option Priorities", I need to set the USB stick as "Boot Option #1" before I can boot the live CD. I was expecting to find Grub, or a Linux listing, here. There is also a menu entry to "Add New Boot Option", which would then become options, 2, 3, 4, etc. To create a new Boot Option, you are prompted to select the "Path for Boot option". The path menu prompts me to select from one of two file systems, one on "Part 1", and the other on "Part 6". After choosing the file system, the next menu item prompts you to select a boot file. I am totally shooting in the dark at this point.
Any advice is welcome.
Thanks!
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