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I am setting up a new machine with ASUS M5A99X EVO R2.0 with the latest firmware AMD FX-8350 AMD64 and would like to do a dual boot with Windows 7 64-bit and Ubuntu Studio 13.10 64-bit. After installing Windows, the Ubuntu installation will not complete saying the 'grub-efi-amd64-signed' package failed to install into /target/.

I have been doing dual boots with Windows and Linux for years with MBR, traditional BIOS, and GRUB legacy on a dedicated partition to keep the OSes independent of each other. The new machine now has UEFI and all that goes with that and I am stumped.

It seems that installing Windows 7 from DVD forces it to use UEFI which then requires Ubuntu to use EFI also. If there is no way to install Windows without UEFI then I would like to at least turn off secure boot if possible to keep the installation simpler. I am not sure yet if the BIOS will allow this. Because UEFI is designed to be used with GPT hard disk formatting, many of the workarounds I have read about using MBR formatting may create problems.

My understanding is that the newer Ubuntus support secure boot, but Windows 7 does not so there needs to be a way of using UEFI but not secure boot for this to work.

Ideally I am looking for a way to set up a dual boot similar to the old setup with an independent bootloader on its on partition and chain-loading. If that is still not possible yet please point me to a successful tutorial of an alternate setup.

Thanks

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Windows 7 doesn't support Secure Boot, so if Windows 7 is already installed, Secure Boot is disabled (or perhaps not supported at all by your motherboard).

Chances are Ubuntu is mostly installed, and you need only install any EFI boot loader you like. Given your current situation, either of two options is likely to be the easiest:

  • Download and prepare a USB flash drive or CD-R of my rEFInd boot manager. You should be able to boot to that, and from there into Ubuntu. Once Ubuntu is running, you can install the Debian-package version of rEFInd, and it should become your default boot manager.
  • Run the Boot Repair tool from an Ubuntu live CD. This action should install a fresh copy of GRUB on your hard disk and make it the default.

Neither option is 100% guaranteed to work. If both fail, post back with the URL that Boot Repair provides and a description of what happened.

You could also try any of the other boot loaders described on my EFI boot loaders page. Installing most of them will take more effort than installing rEFInd or using Boot Repair, but if you learn to do it, you'll be better able to cope with problems in the future.

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