Ok, i have been using Ubuntu since 8.04 on my old laptop, but some months ago i got a new one and since that day i'm having some bad times.
First lemme describe it. It's a CCE (brazilian brand) WM545B-T with 4gb DDR3, Intel i5 Sandy Bridge 2500k iirc, Intel HD 3000 (great integrated card btw) and a 500gb 5200rpm HD (yeah, i know...). It's motherboard is, iirc, a Intel HM65.
As i reported in a question before, when i first got it, i tryed to install Ubuntu 11.04 and got some weird screen bugs. I got around that installing SuperOS, a Ubuntu 11.04 based distro.
Yesterday at 8am (brazil time) i saw some Ubuntu CDs from the oficial release repos (before the oficial release by Canonical), downloaded via torrent, checked md5 and used unetbootin to burn it to a pendrive.
Started the install like i always do any other OS install, the weird screen bug was there again... but this time i was able to click the first option and start the Live CD. Great... i was finally gonna use my loved distro again. Oh man, i was wrong.
The Live CD worked great and insanely fast. I runned the installer and went to the advanced options for partitions. I have 3 NTFS partitions... one with 20gb for W7 64bits, one with 100mb with system files that W7 created and the rest is for my personal files. Made a 25gb ext4 one for Ubuntu and a 4gb swap one. The bottom of the install ask me where i wanna install the bootloader, with /dev/sda (my hd) by default. Then installed it and the install went without a problem. Made me happy ofc.
When the laptop was booting again, the first problem. It did not boot... just freeze at post or restart. Ok... went to the Live CD again and this time tryed a different setup for my partitions.
Tryed to install the bootloader in /dev/sda2, with Windows Boot Loader. This time it booted... but on a EFI Shell, something i have no idea about what is. Tryed again... created swap, ext4 for Ubuntu and this time also created a EFI partition (i thought Hey, it says EFI, lets try it lol)... same EFI Shell saying something about startup.sh and then gimme a Shell> inpurt commands here line of command.
I have never see this EFI Shell before and i can't find infos about it on the internet. Not infos i can use to install Ubuntu at least. Anyone know what is that or how can i install my lovely distro?
Right now i have some options in mind: 1. Format my ENTIRE HD losing 232gb of important fles and try to install Ubuntu 11.10 on the entire HD to see what happens; 2. Install W7 from zero and install Ubuntu with Wubi losing performance with it; 3. Use Fedora (that install and boot normaly) or some Ubuntu 11.10 distro based (that will take sometime to appear); 4. Delete my W7 partition, install Ubuntu 11.10 and then install W7 again... recover grub and see what happens...
Anyone have an answer for this question before i try one of those ideas? My obvious idea is the problem is based on my boot since the Live CD works ok and other distros based on Ubuntu runs fine. I have tested Ubuntu 10.10 and give me same 11.04 issues... but ElemetaryOS, based on 10.10, works fine. I don't know what tweak they do on the boot... but something happens there. Anyone have an answer for this?
EDIT: Ok, i think i may know what is going on.
Runned sudo fdisk -l and this is what i get from it:
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2b510800
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2 206848 40962047 20377600 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 102402048 976771071 437184512 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4 40964094 102402047 30718977 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 94191616 102402047 4105216 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 40964096 94189567 26612736 83 Linux
If you take a close look, there is no "*", so maybe it means there is no boot device set? Then when i try to boot from HD it doesn't find any bootable device and give me the internal shell (EFI Shell). Anyone can help me fix this?
