Dual Booting Pre-installed Windows 8

Question

I've recently purchased a Lenovo T430, and sadly when configuring it, I forgot all about the Linux UEFI Fiasco, and kept the default option of pre-installing Windows 8.

I'm able to disable secure-boot, but what I would like to know is whether I need to install Ubuntu in UEFI or Legacy Mode. I am aware is possible to find this out by installing Ubuntu along side Windows normally and fixing it if it fails (trial & error in my opinion), but I would rather install Ubuntu normally, or install it in UEFI mode first off.

Answer 1

Try doing an EFI-mode installation. Creating a separate EFI System Partition (ESP), as Web-E suggested, is not necessary; Ubuntu and Windows can share a single ESP.

If you do a BIOS-mode installation by accident, it's possible to convert Linux to boot in EFI mode. The Linux-side conversion is pretty straightforward, but it will take jumping through a few hoops to get the Linux boot loader to launch.

I'm not much of a fan of the "boot repair" tool; it does weird and non-standard things that can make it harder for other utilities to cope with the disk. Avoid it if possible.

Answer 2

Give a try with ubuntu 12.10 64 bit. (32 bit won't detect efi).

Basically you need to create a 250mb partition to store efi if you choose manual partition,

and use boot-repair tool to fix the boot if any problem comes.

For more details please see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI .

Disabling UEFI is best option but you may need to reinstall windows 8.

Answer 3

Big "thank-you" Rod Smith and Web-E... and the many Bothans who died to bring us this information. Er... link:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

Just to clarify for anybody else who may gloss over reading their responses and think what I thought ("But I already tried 12.10 64 bit installation!") the distribution linked above is different! It is the 12.10 64-bit "secure boot remix" of Ubuntu. Which apparently not too many people know about... ~3000 downloads according to Sourceforge.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntu-secured/files/

Sidenote: this issue was made a million times more frustrating by the monopoly that upgrade/beta Windows 8-related forum posts have on relevant keywords one looks up when researching this problem... too bad they have had many months to acquire traffic/rank. OEM copies of Windows 8 present different completely different problems... anyway if the above links don't fix your issue definitely consider parsing troubleshooting queries by date to get relevant information!

Anyway, good luck. You're gonna need it...