I have been all over the entire askubuntu.com trying to find a solution to my present issue but none has brought any joy, so I gave up and just had to post this.
I have an HP Envy M6 pre-installed with Windows 8 and HP's recovery bloatware, I couldn't survive without Ubuntu and decided to set it up, I got everything set up with a Live CD, created the right partitions and did everything I was supposed to do and then restarted my pc.
As expected, being a UEFI-based pc, I didn't expect to see a grub menu on next startup without some tinkering, so I decided to get EasyBCD, an app that worked fine on my custom built Desktop, I created the Ubuntu entry in the app and got a boot menu after restarting my PC, and tried booting into Ubuntu, then got a nasty error that some Autoneogrub.mbr
was corrupted or missing, fine, I came back online to seek help and found out EasyBCD doesn't support new UEFI boards.
Then I ventured into the wild, (I couldn't Boot Into Ubuntu yet), I started reading up on how I could get back grub on a UEFI pc that would boot Windows 8 and Ubuntu fine, then I came across the first answer here. I attempted to boot into Ubuntu from the partion created by choosing to boot from the Ubuntu partition on startup and then perfromed the steps in that answer.
I was able to get grub on startup with the Windows Boot Loader(dev/sda2)
entry, but surprisingly I keep getting thrown back into grub, no errors, just grub showing up again, I decided to boot into Ubuntu and reverted back to the state of my /boot/efi/EFI/Microsoft/Boot
directory before I performed the former step , and Windows booted again without any Boot Menu's.
I have tried installing rEFInd and boot-repair in Ubuntu to fix this issue but they didn't help, I didn't even get a refind boot manager, neither did boot-repair, so currently the only way I've been able to boot into Ubuntu is by choosing advanced startup in Windows and then selecting to boot from Ubuntu's partitions.
I think HP's EFI might be behind all this, cause I read so many tutorials on dual-booting Ubuntu on a UEFI-based Pc and they were all okay.
\EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI
and thus only booting Windows and OSes that provide this binary and disregard booting NVRAM entries. I don't know why the market moves into this direction, possibly to reduce complexity, but I recall watching a video of an HP engineer at a Linux conference a few years back talkig about UEFI, stating they were deeply involved with EFI back in IA64 days.