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so here goes another dual boot thread. Before anybody screams at me, I've scoured the internet looking for threads, because Lenovo apparently decides to over complicate things.

So here we go:

Lenovo g500s, relatively new. I use elementary OS in a VM typically, but now I'd rather dual boot for school. My CD drive is spazzing out, and whenever I attempt to make a bootable USB drive through UNetBootin or whatever, I can boot into it, but all I get is some white lines and dots across the top half of my screen.

I attempted to buy an external DVD drive for the live CD...

Since Lenovos have some button next to the power button which brings you to the bios (UEFI I guess, not really bios) instead of being able to press f12 like any other computer, I go and look at my boot options. The USB DVD drive isn't registering, and all I get under my boot options is the windows boot manager. Disabling Secure Boot doesn't help either.

But what does seem to work is changing from UEFI to "Legacy Support". But I can still leave the option to try to boot to UEFI first, and not legacy first. After changing this and rebooting into bios, I am greeted by wonderful options showing my external dvd drive, internal hard drive, etc. These are under a title "Legacy" and above the "Legacy" is the "EFI" which holds the Windows boot manager.

So now, I'm able to boot into the live cd. Great, all is swell and dandy.

But I've been reading a lot of things about dual booting, and they all say that if Windows is installed using EFI, that your other OS should be installed using EFI as well. However, I feel like by changing the option before, now it's running in legacy mode or something, and I'm pretty afraid that it's going to mess something up.

So by doing this, am I incurring any risks, or am I just driving myself insane? I still get the options on the live CD to install alongside windows, although I'm not sure if that's what I need to do in this case. I shrank my C:\ partition in windows to allot some room for eOS, so I think that should just give me the option to use that, correct? Or do I need to go under the "something else" part, and start getting lost and trying to figure that junk out?

Anyways, thanks for the help in advance, and sorry for the horrible paranoia; these machines are pretty expensive, and I'd rather not be sitting on a 500 dollar brick.

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  • Your UEFI problem is most likely a variant on the infamous "black screen" problems that are covered in detail in this question and its answers. You can probably get it working with a suitable kernel option in GRUB (or whatever you use for a boot loader). In a worst-case scenario, you can install Ubuntu in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode and then switch boot modes with the computer's built-in boot manager or with rEFInd.
    – Rod Smith
    Mar 29, 2015 at 21:11

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I have a Lenovo laptop too and i did not want to turn off the UEFI mode, so i Created a Bootable USB that is UEFI and Legacy Compatiable. I did not have to disable Fastboot or UEFI.

The reason i did not want to turn off the UEFI is that i feel more secure. you can read about the advantages of UEFI here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/what-uefi

The main reason for not disabling UEFI for me is that it offer better security by helping to protect the pre-startup process against bootkit attacks.

but disabling UEFI should not be a problem and it wont mess anything up. Legacy mode is compatible with other systems that UEFI might not be, such as older Windows versions or some Linux operating systems.

Hope i helped

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