Day 21: Lenovo and UEFI

The Story

Lenovo arrives with Win8 installed on it. We need Ubuntu and perhaps Windows 7 in order to make use of this lovely laptop for AR and for the new OpenGL stuff for next years third year (or was it second) graphics course. So Ubuntu had been installed on top of Win8, and was working OK for a short while (a few hours?) before it stopped booting (i.e. Ubuntu wouldn't boot any more)

The Lenovo was failing in Ubuntu because... actually we don't know why that was.

But at the same time it wasn't starting Windows 8 because the laptop had been set to Legacy mode (deactivating UEFI) in order to install Ubuntu. This could be fixed by re-enabling UEFI in the bios, which we did, and got back the Windows 8.

We had:
working Windows 8 but a completely dead Ubuntu in UEFI mode; and
a completely dead Windows 8 with a broken Ubuntu (recovery mode seemed to work) in Legacy mode.

Installing other stuff (Win7 and Ubuntu) in Legacy mode meant the original Windows 8 installation would be unusable unless we switched to UEFI (and switch back when we want to use Ubuntu or Windows 7). Repeated switching between UEFI and Legacy could be a cause of problems so is best avoided.

The solution: install Windows 7 and Ubuntu alongside the Win 8 installation, all in UEFI mode so that we never need legacy.

This didn't work because the Win 8 installation had monopolized the entire 1TB hard drive into a GPT partition style because of UEFI - Win 7 can't be installed on that style of HDD file system. Making new partitions and trying to format them for Win 7 proved useless. The solution is to use a blank drive that hasn't been corrupted by GPT upon which we install Win 7, or to format this entire drive (i.e. not just a partition of it) so that it is non-GPT NTFS that supports Win 7.

We chose to forget UEFI and its GPT peculiarities and problems (this was taking far too much time), switch entirely to legacy mode and install the 3 OS's one by one ourselves. Then we decided we didn't need Win 8 at all so stuck to installing Win7 and then Ubuntu. The reason we didn't do this immediately was because in order to go full on Legacy Win 7 install, we would need to format the entire hard drive meaning all of the inbuilt recovery and backup and hidden Lenovo partitions would be lost and unrecoverable.

Win 7 installed on the fully formatted hard drive perfectly, had to boot with a bootable GParted USB (PartedMagic didn't work) in order to format the drive beforehand but all worked out in the end.

Unfortunately when the Ubuntu install was attempted, apparently it could not see the NTFS Win 7 partitions on the disk (strange..) and saw it all as free space, so we still don't have Ubuntu up and running. This blasphemy shall be sorted out first thing on the 'morrow.

Katy

Upgraded Katy with the new 2TB hard drive and copied the system to the new disk (as its much faster), also installing the new RAM dimms that came from Walter. They didn't work alongside Donald's RAM (the proprietary Dell motherboard didn't like it) so I just used Walter's higher performance sticks alone.

Will get back to 123D Catch and AR work straight after the Lenovo is sorted out provided it doesn't take too long.

In the meantime two 123D trials with Anna were completed, indoors and in the courtyard. Stay tuned for more juicy details..