I seem to have almost entirely screwed up my machine. I was attempting to install an ubuntu liveusb to my external hdd, but in the process I messed up my internal setup. The external one works ;)
It's a dual boot system, and it originally came with win8 plus a whole bunch of Lenovo/windows recovery partitions. It has a 24gb SSD hybrid as well. I had secureboot disabled before, and installed ubuntu 13.04, and recently upgraded to 14.04. It was working fine until my little misadventure. All of my boot flags seem to be constantly changing now, too. I'm not entirely sure why.
Output from boot-repair (which wouldn't allow me to choose /dev/sda2 or /dev/sda11, only sda8 (which is my home partition?). I tried it anyway. It said it succeeded, but didn't do anything obviously.
http://paste.ubuntu.com/7303953/
My (many) partitions are as follows:
/dev/sda1 -- WINRE_DRV (1000mb ntfs, flags: hidden, diag)
/dev/sda2-- this was my original EFI partition I think (was originally labelled as SYSTEM_DRV and was formatted as fat32, but now it's an unrecognized filesystem).
/dev/sda3 -- unknown, msftres ??
/dev/sda4 -- Windows8 OS (68GB ntfs, flags: msftdata)
/dev/sda11 -- I created this as fat32 with the 'boot' flag, in the hopes of creating another efi partition and moving it over, but it doesn't seem to be recognized by boot-repair.
/dev/sda5 (350mb, ntfs flags:hidden, diag) -- No idea what this is.
/dev/sda6 (20GB ext4, flags: hidden?) -- my system partition for ubuntu. Not sure why it now has a 'hidden' flag.
/dev/sda7 -- 4GB swap
/dev/sda8 -- my home partition for ubuntu (75gb ext3, flags: msftdata)
/dev/sda10 -- 290GB ntfs shared data partition (flags: msftdata)
/dev/sda9 -- Lenovo recovery (10GB ntfs, flags: hidden, diag)
Something is seriously screwed up here. I'd really rather prefer to not reformat. I've read most of the articles regarding UEFI and GPT, etc, but I can't seem to fix my problem, and actually just seem to be making it worse.
It's also possible that the livecd grub isn't using the right files? It tries to install with i386-pc, when I thought i should be using something like x86_64-efi-signed or something.
Could someone please help walk me through this?
Edit:
Ok, so I downloaded and installed rEFInd to windows and made a bootable USB with that, which allowed me to boot into my actual Linux OS and not a LiveCD. From there I was able to use boot-repair properly to install grub (to /dev/sda11) and to boot /dev/sda6.
The problem with boot-repair before was that it didn't detect my EFI partition so it was trying to install non-efi to my /dev/sda6 (likely because I was doing it from a livecd). It seems to be an issue with the grub which comes with ubuntu14.04 though, that it doesn't have EFI support or something?
Anyway, now I have EFI on /dev/sda11, but I have two unknown partitions (sda2 and sda3). What was sda3 in the first place? And what can I do with sda2 and the files on it (like for Lenovo recovery stuff)? Can I just delete those partitions, or will that cause more issues?
Finally, is it just a matter of running windows recovery now? I imagine that will break my ubuntu and grub again.
Thanks!
/dev/sda
)?dev/sda2
anddev/sda3
. Did you want to reinstall both windows and ubuntu?