Friday, January 04, 2013

Lenovo T430u Windows 8 (pre-installed) and Ubuntu 12.04 dual boot

This is a personal note (possibly useful to others) of my experience with installing Ubuntu on a Lenovo t430u laptop that I got recently.

First of all the major issue in the installation was the SecureBoot feature that is packed into Windows 8. As a result when you try to boot a LiveUSB containing the Ubuntu installation script, Windows does not recognise this. I saw that Ubuntu 12.10 is supposedly compatible with the secure boot nature of Windows 8 but even when I tried, it still was not recognised...(this is a developing story, may be in a year or in the next LTS of Ubuntu they will fix it... ).

So the first step is to disable the secureboot option by going into the bios---For lenovo users


  1. Press enter and F1 during start up to enter bios screen
  2. Disable Secure Boot---(Under Tab Security--->Secure Boot--> choose Disable )
  3. Under tab Startup (in Bios)---> UEFI/Legacy Boot--Choose Legacy only (without doing this I found that on startup after installing Ubuntu, grub does not load!!!!) 
  4. Under tab Restart (in Bios)... Load Setup Defaults (this was another thing that I think tends to load the original startup conditions (thus disabling non-(UEFI/Secure Boot signed) software).), I disabled this as well

Having done the above things one can install Ubuntu and grub will load on start up..It may seem as though everything is great. In fact it is on the Ubuntu side of things. But now when you choose the Windows from grub...there is an error! This is a combined issue of grub + number 3 we did above by making Legacy the
only booting option. In any case first go to the Ubuntu side and fix grub as follows:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/221835/installing-ubuntu-on-a-pre-installed-uefi-supported-windows-8-system
I am following the part right below the question in the above post:


After finishing the installation, if you happen to have Windows 8 disabled from booting and it only boots to Ubuntu, do not worry. In Ubuntu after it boots, open a Terminal and type the following:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair
Now run boot-repair
Boot Repair will mention that we have some GRUB error, that we have an EFI system and that Ubuntu rocks. Since Ubuntu rocks (It does not work if Ubuntu does not rock! ^^), just click onApply so boot repair fixes everything. No reboot and you should see Windows 8 and Ubuntu side by side.

The one change we need to do after restarting following Boot Repair is to change step 3 above:
Under tab Startup (in Bios)---> UEFI/Legacy Boot--Choose Both with UEFI first option

Then grub should work as one expects with Ubuntu and Windows options...(Windows Boot is the right one to choose amongst the many different Windows options)


4 comments:

Jirka Chadima said...

This is a great tutorial. The only change I had to do was leaving the UEFI/Legacy Boot settings on UEFI First during installation. Ubuntu 12.04.1 then installed efi grub and the boot-repair worked like a charm.

When ubuntu was installed in legacy mode, boot repair did not work.

Amit K said...

Hi Prasanna...thanks for your blog...i need your help. Can i get your contact details?

Anonymous said...

Hello, thank you for this post.
Can you tell me if everything is working under linux?
It is hard to find informations about this model.

Regards

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much!!!

What a pain in the A@$%. I was just trying to put Windows 7 on as opposed to Windows 8 and couldn't figure out all the tweaks in the BIOS. Thank you so much!!