Although many people have successfully installed Ubuntu Gnome on their Surface Pro 3, including on their MicroSD card, I just can't seem to get it to boot on my SP3.
Here's what I did so far:
- Disabled UEFI Secure Boot, giving me the red boot screen.
- Inserted a high-speed Ultra Plus 32GB MicroSD HCI card in the slot behind the SP3's kickstand.
- Installed Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 Live ISO to a USB key with UNetbootin.
- Plugged in a USB Hub with my mouse/keyboard and Live USB key.
- Booted to Live USB with Volume Down/Power Button
- Installed Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 to MicroSD card, and Grub 2 to Windows C partition (In the end I did not connect to a wifi network as it seemed flaky and the Live USB runs very slowly.)
Then I rebooted, but it just went straight to Windows with no Grub boot manager.
I then tried the Volume Down/Power Button boot, but it also went right to Windows. Then I tried Recovery Options > Advanced Startup > Use A Device to try "ubuntu" and "USB Device", both of which booted to Windows.
I decided to try EasyBCD because it has UEFI support and has worked well for me with Vista and Windows 7 when Grub alone caused problems. However, after trying a few different tutorials I am still unable to boot to Ubuntu Gnome or see Grub. Instead I see an error screen pointing to "\NST\AutoNeoGrub0.mbr" or "\NST\NeoGrub.mbr" and saying a required file is missing or contains errors.
Can anyone suggest a fix for this? Thank you!
PS. The SP3 is able to boot from the microSD port and treats it as a USB device; I installed the Live ISO to it and it booted fine by holding the Volume Down button. The high-speed card is also plenty fast for my purposes.