If you have a Sony VAIO laptop (it could be E series or S series), there is a strong chance that your laptop’s MOBO uses Insyde H2O EFI bios. Getting Ubuntu dual booting with Windows 7 is not as straight forward as it usually is for most systems. I won’t go in to the details of partitioning and installation of Ubuntu alongside Windows 7. The procedure is straightforward, except that you should be careful to install Grub bootloader in /dev/sda3
The step by step procedure to achieve dual boot with Windows 7 is:
1. Install Ubuntu 12.04 from USB alongside Win 7 choosing the boot partition /dev/sda3 (in most likelihood). To confirm this you can take a look at the partition table of your laptop by booting using a Ubuntu Live CD/USB and then running GParted. It might look somewhat like this:
2. Now we mount /dev/sda3 from the live session. To do so open a terminal and do the following
Now the boot partition is mounted.sudo mkdir /media/fat32sudo mount /dev/sda3 /media/fat32
3. Copy EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi to EFI/Boot/ followed by renaming EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi to bootx64.efi.old and then renaming EFI/Boot/grubx64.efi to bootx64.efi
You can achieve these by doing:
On most machines this should be enough and if you reboot you would get the grub menu, but it won’t have a Windows 7 entry, which we would create by booting in to Ubuntu. However, on my laptop this was not enough and I needed to make another change in EFI/Microsoft folder as given belowcd /media/fat32sudo cp EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi EFI/Boot/cd EFI/Bootsudo mv bootx64.efi bootx64.efi.oldsudo mv grubx64.efi bootx64.efi
now reboot.cd ../ sudo mv Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi.oldsudo cp ubuntu/grubx64.efi Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi
4. Now from the Grub menu that you see, boot into Ubuntu and then using text editor of your choice, edit the following file to add an Entry for Windows 7.
Save the file and on reboot you would get a new entry for Windows, which would boot Win 7 for you.sudo gedit /etc/grub.d/40_custommenuentry "Windows 7" {set root='(hd0,gpt3)'chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi.old}
I was having same exact problem and excluding the part(adding menunetry for windows 7) your solution worked well.
ReplyDeleteNow the boot menu only shows ubuntu and Windows recovery mode. When I select Windows recovery mode it says invalid EFI path. Please elaborate the last part of solution.
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ReplyDeleteThank you. Your tips worked pretty fine for my Sony Vaio SVS13115FBB.
ReplyDeleteI haven't tried step 4 yet, but I don't think it's going to be a problem.
Also, I really had to use an USB drive to install Ubuntu, since booting with a LiveCD resulted in a kernel panic (even though the CD works in non-EFI computers).
Best regards.
You forgot to say that, after editing 40_custom in step 4, it's necessary to run "sudo update-grub" before rebooting. With that, it also worked perfectly for my SVS13115FBB.
ReplyDeleteThanks again.
Fucking A mate... tks a lot!
ReplyDeleteThanks you for your post. It has worked for me in a Sony Vaio SVS1511C5E. I also had to mage changes in EFI/Microsoft folder.
ReplyDeleteI think before the instruction "cd ../ sudo mv Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi.old" you should add "cd /media/fat32/EFI", as people usually will do it after reboot if the first block of instructions don't work.
Hello , with this solution hibernation and quickwakeup features of SVS1511 still works??
ReplyDeleteI had a problem trying to access the Windows 8. "EFI invalid path"
ReplyDeleteI did all steps.
Can You help me?
This may work only on legacy BIOS but not on UEFI. If your Win is already there and is installed under UEFI mode you muct use UEFI to install Linux. This is not easy and above procedure does non work. If your win is installed under legacy - it may work.
ReplyDelete