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I recently got my hands on a laptop Vaio Pro 13 with a 128GB SSD and was planning on setting up a Ubuntu machine mainly for programming and local server. Due to the scarce amount of storage available (can't afford any upgrades for now) I didn't feel like dual booting with Windows and wasting precious memory.

Before getting dirty, I checked if the hardware had Ubuntu certification and, well, it didn't. Went off to tutorials but, unfortunately, the only "proof" I had that what I'm trying to do is feasible is this guy:

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Sony-VAIO-Pro-13-SVP132A1CL-Intel-i7-1-8GHZ-16-GB-SSD-8-GB-RAM-Touchscreen-/372279364116?rmvSB=true

Even though I couldn't find any useful tutorials for my machine model/maker and version 16.04, I decided to risk it. The trial from the LiveCD went great (even the touchscreen worked), but after the install, Vaio's keeps insisting on booting Windows and I can't get past the recovery options. The similar questions I found mostly deal with dual booting, but I would like to keep a single OS if practical.

The following helped me to understand where's the problem a bit better, yet not fixing it.

And here are the reports for "Boot-Repair" attempts:

Any help would be deeply appreciated, thanks in advance.

Bruno Viegas
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2 Answers2

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So I finally managed to get the single boot going.

I'm not sure which step actually solved it but here are the ones I took:

  1. Disabled "Secure Boot" on BIOS setup
  2. Changed boot setting from "EFI" to "Legacy" (BIOS/CMS)
  3. Unchecked "Download updates while installing"
  4. Selected "Something else" on "Installation type"
    • I've a feeling that the magic happened at this point. This is what the partitions looked like from the previous install > Partition table
    • So I erased all of them and added 534MB of "boot reserved space" (I'm not sure about the exact names of the options)
    • Added 119004MB of "ext4"
    • Added 8494MB of "swap"
    • Formatted disk
  5. And again the installation wasn't successful... So I decided to have a clean install to play around partitions and see if something worked
  6. Ran the installation again but this time with "Installation type" set as "Erase disk and install Ubuntu" and as I clicked on "Continue" I noticed the alert "Write the changes to disk?" only listed 2 partitions (main and swap) instead of the usual 3 it'd been showing earlier
  7. Finished the install as usual and Voilà, the system booted!

Hope this helps anyone stuck on VAIO booting loops.

Edit

A month ago or so, I had to set it back to Windows and was stuck for hours while the backup media wouldn't get past formatting the disk. Or better yet, I could format the disk, but not install boot instructions.

Fiddling around later I remembered this post, switched back to Legacy and it worked like a charm.

Bruno Viegas
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If you want to keep UEFI enabled (and SecureBoot, too), the only thing to do after installation is to rename the Linux EFI boot entry to Windows Boot Manager, because the firmware is hard-coded to boot only that and it ignores the standard BootOrder EFI variable, too.

So, for booting only Linux, it's best to delete all existing entries for Windows and create a new one with the hard-coded name pointing to Linux.

My SVP13 has been happily running only Linux (Fedora) ever since I figured this out.

Rathann
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