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Similar to a previous questioner who did not appear to get an appropriate answer (being referred to a page that did not relate to his specific need) I wish to run a full 64bit version of Ubuntu 13.10 from my 64g USB3 stick. OK, I have actually done this, no problem. But the issue is I would like to be able to boot from this large USB stick onto my UEFI laptop, running Win 8.1, which, of course won't recognise it without me changing the setup in a way that won't let me run Win 8.1 without changing the setup back again. Messy. I've already created a 'Live' 64bit Ubuntu 64bit 13.10 installation on another USB stick which I definitely know I could use to install Ubuntu onto a new partition on my UEFI - Secure Boot Win 8.1 machine. But I don't want to do that. I simply want to run full Ubuntu from my large format USB stick on that machine - and I don't know a way of making that stick UEFI bootable at the same time as installing Ubuntu on it again (or diddling with the existing installation, if necessary). The problem is that I'm obliged to create any new installation on this stick via an old non-UEFI computer. I can't do it via my Win 8.1 machine. So I just to not get any option via the 'Something Else' installation method to choose EFI. Phew! Anybody know what I can do (apart from take a running jump)? David

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Not sure why you cannot use Windows UEFI system to create UEFI flash drive. You should still turn off fast boot, and probably turn off secure boot. You then should be able to boot Ubuntu installer and using Something Else install to the second flash drive. You must specify to install grub2's boot loader to that flash drive.

If not you cannot easily create a UEFI bootable device on a BIOS system. You can manually partition with gpt which is required for for UEFI boot. But Ubuntu will also boot in BIOS mode from gpt partitioned drives and Boot-Repair will convert a BIOS install to UEFI by uninstalling grub-pc and installing grub-efi. But that needs to be on a UEFI system.

You can format in advance using gparted, advanced choose gpt not default msdos(MBR) partitioning. Create 200 or 300MB FAT32 partition with boot flag so it is efi partition. If booting initially in BIOS mode create an unformatted 1 or 2MB partition with the bios_grub flag. Then add partitions you want, / (root) and /home or data. If wanting to also share data with Windows, make first partition NTFS, and efi etc after that.

I have not tried it but you may be able to just copy grub's efi boot files into efi partition and add a configfile to get it to find grub.cfg in your install. Or manually boot from grub rescue and reinstall grub.

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  • Oldfred - who is probably younger than I am - thank you so much. I will need to work on your answers, most of which are above my paygrade, but I suspect you may have helped me enormously. If something in there works for me I shall come back here and post a blow-by-blow account of what I did.
    – David
    Feb 16, 2014 at 17:33

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