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I am trying to install ubuntu 14.04(32 bit) along with windows 8 pro(32 bit).
My lenovo laptop came with UEFI mode enabled but I disabled it and enabled legacy mode.
My laptop now boots in legacy mode and secureboot is also disabled, but my ubuntu installation does not recognize windows and it's partitions. I don't have a 64 bit ubuntu.
I also tried it with older versions of ubuntu but the same case arises. I am not interested in losing the existing windows installation and believe that changing legacy to UEFI again will do so.
How to solve this issue?

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    Boot to Ubuntu (select try it) and edit your question with the output of sudo fdisk -l (lower case -L). Thanks. I suspect that if you reformatted the disk from GPT (required with UEFI) to MBR, you've got a bit of leftover GPT data that Ubuntu doesn't like. If that's the case see here. The output from fdisk will confirm that.
    – bcbc
    Mar 3, 2015 at 17:30
  • bcbc is probably on the right track. I'll add, though, that enabling BIOS/CSM/legacy mode in the firmware setup utility may not switch the computer to boot only in that mode. In most cases, this action simply gives you the option to boot in BIOS mode. Existing installations will continue to boot in EFI mode. To fully switch you'd need to either re-install Windows or convert the disk from GPT to MBR and modify boot loaders. If you did this, then follow bcbc's advice. If not, then something else is probably going on.
    – Rod Smith
    Mar 5, 2015 at 19:36

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If your Windows installation is setup up to boot UEFI and you plan to keep Windows (which isn't a bad idea), then the best way is to install Ubuntu in UEFI mode too. This way detection should work, otherwise GRUB isn't able to detect and chainload the Windows UEFI bootloader.

UEFI and MBR-booting are different, incompatible architectures.

To solve your problem, you could install the UEFI version of GRUB in your current installation, which would replace GRUB-MBR, but you would also need to make some configuration changes, therefore it's better to install Ubuntu in UEFI mode anew.

Also I don't know of any 32-Bit Windows 8 OEM installations. Typical Windows 8 laptops from major manufacturers should feature a 64-Bit CPU¹ and 64-Bit OS. There should be no reason to install a 32-Bit anymore.

¹ If you actually have a computer that shipped with Windows 8 and has a 32-Bit CPU, then plase tell us the model number of you computer.

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