Installing ubuntu on Lenovo U410

Question

A couple of months ago I bought a Lenovo U410 (i5 ivy bridge, 8gb ram, 25gb SSD, 500gb HDD). Great quality which I got real cheap.

Unfortunately it came infested with this thing called Windows 8. Have not really had time to install Ubuntu on it, but now I am going to take time.

However, when checking around it seems like it will be a little more complicated than usually. So does anybody have any experience of doing it? I would like to get rid of Win 8 completely and likewise I was thinking of installing ubuntu on the SSD and using the HDD for dumb storage, will that be good setup (not going to install any applications except Eclipse and some other small media applications)?

So far I have figured out that I must diasble the RAID setup: Unable to install 12.04 on a Lenovo U410 Ultrabook

Alternatively I migh also need to delete the raid partitions, use dmraid to remove the meta data and label the disks as 'gpt': http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2052975 Or will that be needed only if I want a dual boot option? (Wow to "lable the disks as gpt"?)

Also it seems like some people have had problems getting into BIOS after installing Ubuntu: http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/IdeaPad-Y-U-V-Z-and-P-series/Lenovo-U410-Cannot-access-to-BIOS/td-p/877703 But all those people seem to have disabled UEFI. I do not need to do that to install Ubuntu, right?

So, does anybody have any helping comments for me?

Answer 1

I had some trouble while installing Ubuntu 13.04 on a Lenovo ThinkCentre, which is not directly related to your question, but you might see some smiliarities here. First, removing Win8 causes issues as the standard Lenovo boot process asks for a Windows entry in the EFI boot partition - just about the entry, not about 'real' data. I did this via command line on a Live-CD. (Got the info from this forum entry.) You can verify if an entry is there with

$ sudo efibootmgr -v

If it is missing, create one

$ sudo efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -l '\EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi' -L "Windows Boot Manager"

Then verify, if the entry is there and check the boot order; Ubuntu needs to be first, followed by the Windows entry then the remaining ones:

$ sudo efibootmgr -v
$ sudo efibootmgr -o 0000,0001,000A,000B,000C #according to the boot entries

Prior to an UEFI installation I also got rid of the standard partition tables and created GPT partition tables manually, although Ubuntu does that automatically if you pick the option of "install Ubuntu and use entire disk". Since I did want my root and home to be separated, I did not follow this procedure, so used gparted on a Live-CD.

Then, crucial was to flash the BIOS, which I did by downloading the .ISO-file from Lenovo's website and created a Live-USB drive. This step was incredibly important, as the Lenovo UEFI could not detect the signed Ubuntu kernel ("Error 1962 - no operating system found"). After that I did not need to turn off Secure Boot, Quick Boot and OS Optimized Setup options inside the "BIOS". Here is the entry for grbu4bios with a nice description (credits go there), download the latest edition from here (scroll down to the bottom of the page) and unpack it to your working directory:

$ sudo fdisk -l   #find out which one is your USB drive
$ sudo ./bootlace.com /dev/sdb

1. copy these two files to the USB drive: grld and menu.lst
2. copy the bios.ISO (e.g. f1j951usa.iso) to the USB drive

3. open menu.lst with gedit:

   title thinkpad-bios #can be any title
   map (hd0,0)/f1j951usa.iso (hd32) #according to the file you've downloaded
   map --hook chainloader (hd32)
boot

After that, boot from the USB drive and select the last entry, follow the procedures. You might want to note down the Serial# and MachineID first, in case the flashing process asks for updating those two.