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I have a Lenovo TS130 that has an absolutely terrible BIOS. I think it probably dates back tot he vendor's first forays into UEFI. It lacks an EFI OROM for Intel RAID, only has a legacy OROM for that. If you use the 'F12' key to choose a boot device, it automatically drops into legacy/CSM boot mode, so I have to use boot DVDs and set the boot order to get it to start an installer in EFI mode.

Anyways, I can boot and install Windows in EFI mode just fine, but when I install Ubuntu, it lets me do the install, creates the UEFI partitions, but then it fails with a "1962: OS not found"-type message when it tries to boot from the hard drive after the installation.

I was thinking about looking carefully at the partitioning of the Windows install, or even just doing an Ubuntu install over the Windows install so the partition table stays the same (reformatting the 'NTFS - C:' drive as 'ext4 - /'). But before I do this, are there any 'special modes' that the Ubuntu or grub installer have that might make it work? I'm thinking it might be a GPT vs. MBR type thing where the BIOS doesn't fully-implement the modern spec.

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  • I think I may have just figured out what was going on. The BIOS might be a 'Class 1' UEFI BIOS, meaning that it has UEFI aspects, but wants to boot using legacy mechanisms (not the EFI partition). wiki.osdev.org/UEFI#UEFI_class_0-3_and_CSM . I'm going to look at how the Ubuntu installer DVD and the Windows install I have are working, and try to replicate that manually under a Linux install. Mar 5, 2020 at 16:08
  • Just my opinion(possibly dumb), but why not trying to install as legacy boot? All OSs should be done the same on that machine, don't try mixing bios legacy and uefi on different OSs.
    – crip659
    Mar 5, 2020 at 16:20
  • Try the device default bootloader, at .../EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi (make it a copy of grubx64.efi). Have the normal Ubuntu EFI files in .../EFI/ubuntu (especially the grub.cfg file). Then select the device to boot, no nvram entry needed.
    – ubfan1
    Mar 5, 2020 at 16:32

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