Hi Douglas, Thanks very much for the tip. Have been busy and haven't got round to try out vbeinfo in grub. Will try it soon and see what it says. Wen On Sep 7, 2014 11:58 PM, "Douglas Ray" <dougray@cpan.org> wrote:
Hi Wen Lin, did you try "vbeinfo" at the GRUB prompt?
cheers Douglas
On 6/09/14 5:14 PM, Wen Lin wrote:
Hi,
I've been trying for weeks to install Ubuntu 14.04 onto my friend's new Toshiba laptop with the new UEFI secure boot built-in. So far, no luck! I can't even boot it up with the Ubuntu Live CD, regardless of SecureBoot enabled or disabled.
First, some info and what I had done so far:
Laptop: Toshiba Satellite C50D-A (My friend bought from JB Hifi for $480 - not a high-end machine) CPU: AMD E1-1200 APU with Radeon HD Graphic 1.4 GHz 64-bit Memory: 4 GB HD: 500 GB Display adapter: AMD Radeon HD 7310 Graphic OS: Windows 8 (I had since upgraded it to Win 8.1)
I had: - Created a Win System Recovery image (using Win 8.1 built-in standard tool) to a USB flash disk. - Also used Win 8.1 built-in tool to shrink the C: drive to 255 GB, leaving me the other half of the disk for my Ubuntu install.
I had no problem F2 at startup into the laptop's BIOS to change stuff like: - Boot sequence - Enable/Disable SecureBoot - Swap between UEFI Boot & CSM Boot (or Legacy mode)
I had googled around quite a lot, and had tried several different approaches suggested, to no avail.
Most of the forum sites/blogs suggest disable SecureBoot, some said no need - as newer Distro like Ubuntu 14.04 nowadays have no problem booting with SecureBoot on.
I tried both approaches, but the Live CD first could only display a text-based version of GRUB 2 boot menu, with "Try Ubuntu" & "Install Ubuntu" among the menu options (rather than the Ubuntu's usual graphical one). Then when I selected either the "Try" or "Install" options, it went into a total blank screen, and a moment later, everything stop - I tried waiting for it, sometimes hours, but it never come back!
To try to see some messages, I used 'e' in the Grub menu to get into an editing mode: set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/... boot=casper quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz
To edit the kernel boot up parameters - generally involved replacing the "quiet splash" with parameters like "nomodeset", "vga=radeon", "vga=792", etc - all to no avail. But this time I could see some boot up messages splashing out, and then stopped at certain point: E.g. - [drm] Initialized radeon 1.34.0 ... - ahci 0000:00:11:0: flags: 64bit ncq ... - r8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver ... - fb: conflicting fb hw usage radeondrmfb vs EFI VGA - removing generic driver - ACPI: Video Device [VGA] (multi-head: yes rom: no post: no)
In general, it would seem the different boot parameters could only vary in at most several boot steps, but none of them managed to go all the way to successfully boot into Ubuntu Live.
I had also tried other Distros: Ubuntu 13.10 64-bit & Linux Mint 15 Cinnamon 64-bit - no different. I even tried an Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit CD - but it boot straight into the Windows 8.1 instead.
Another thing to point out: I had also tried the CSM Boot option (in place of the default UEFI). When in this mode, the whole "SecureBoot" feature disappeared, and I managed to boot into Ubuntu 14.04 Live CD, all the local programs, WiFi, Internet, the lots, all worked as normal! I had not tried installing Ubuntu from there. Just as well! As attempt to boot back to Win 8.1 failed - the error message basically was saying that the Win 8.1 is not there anymore! I could only boot back to Win 8.1 normally after I had reverted back to UEFI Boot mode.
As you can see, no joy at all! :-(
So my question: Is it a UEFI/SecureBoot problem, or an AMD Radeon display adapter problem? If it's a display adapter problem, then why I could boot into Ubuntu when not in UEFI mode? If it's a UEFI problem, then why couldn't I boot into Ubuntu with the SecureBoot disabled (said so by all the related forums & blogs I had visited so far - i.e. secureboot off - no problem)?
I was pondering, if all else failed, to just install Ubuntu 14.04 into the partition I had freed up, while in CSM mode. If this worked, then I could persuade my friend to just stick to Ubuntu, and occasionally if wanting to go to Wn 8.1, change back to UEFI before doing so. While this may work (painfully), my friend might one day decide not to go back to Ubuntu, and my efforts would be wasted. Worst still, installing Ubuntu in CSM mode may render the Win 8.1 unbootable, and I don't think my friend want that!
Any suggestions, comments, or experience in such dual boot adventure would be welcomed!
Thanks in advance.
Wen
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