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I started on a journey to dual boot my Win8 system with Ubuntu 12.04, but I have been hitting with one or the other problem.

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 with Win8 successfully apart from the issue of RaLink 3290 not wireless not working. When I got that working, I got "kernel panic" problem, so I decided to do everything clean once again since I did a lot of trial and error to arrive at the current situation.

So I brought my PC to factory condition(only Win8) with a single partition and a Recovery partition.

Now the problem is that my bootable USB with Ubuntu is not detected at all in the boot up seq. I deliberately pressed "Esc + F9", but surprisingly my USB does not even appear in the Boot Menu.

I have another age old laptop with WinXP, which detects the bootable USB, so that means there is some problem with my current Win8 PC.

Any help will be appreciated and set me on another journey to have Ubuntu live!!

P.S : I have a UEFI based system.

Update: 1) I can see the USB drive in windows normally 2) I can see it in BIOS and USB is in higher priority in the BOOT order. So no problems there too. The problem is that I don't see the USB in the BOOT menu, but I see the same USB in the boot menu of my WinXP. So there is some problem in my BIOS which is not able to detect my USB as a bootable device. Here I am at loss as what could be the problem?

geezanansa
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user180630
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  • Is your USB stick a usb 3.0, or 2.0? There are known issues with usb 3.0 and bios detection. You can try changing the automatic boot order in your BIOS to put every single device before your HDD, with USB related devices at the top. I usually do this if I have any problems selecting a boot device, to help rule out bizarre glitches. – Alex Aug 05 '13 at 13:43
  • Thanks for answering. As I said, I already did an installation of Ubuntu with the same USB stick. So I do not guess there is any problem with the USB disk. Even my XP PC is detecting the USB as bootable. I think the problem is when I invoked the HP Recovery Manager. Looks like some traces of boot seq is left somewhere and it is meddling with the USB detection. – user180630 Aug 05 '13 at 14:11
  • Dang that sounds like a heck of a problem to solve. Tried updating BIOS? I would flash the BIOS with a stock file again anyways, just to be safe. Luckily you still have win8 installed, and you can run a BIOS flasher through that. – Alex Aug 05 '13 at 14:14
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    Thanks for answering. 2things: 1) I can see the USB drive in windows normally 2) I can see it in BIOS and USB is in higher priority in the BOOT order. So no problems there too. The problem is that I don't see the USB in the BOOT menu, but I see the same USB in the boot menu of my WinXP. So there is some problem in my BIOS which is not able to detect my USB as a bootable device. Here I am at loss as what could be the proble? – user180630 Aug 05 '13 at 15:32
  • Hey, if I may ask, is your PC configured to boot from flash..? If yes, then try that same flash on another PC and see if it boots from flash. then let me know – Zuko Sep 06 '14 at 11:52
  • I don't have legacy support enabled and could get the usb to be detected simply by changing the boot priority order in the BIOS. – Gaurang Tandon May 06 '19 at 05:16

3 Answers3

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Try these:

Change UEFI to legacy boot support in the BIOS setup

install ubuntu in USB drive using a software instead of manually from CMD or terminal.

user430142
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If your new computer came pre-installed with Windows 8, there are a few BIOS level settings that prevent you from booting off your USB device or any other media (CD/DVD) other then your Windows 8 install, all by default.

  1. Secure Boot: [Enabled] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Secure_boot)
  2. OS Mode Selection: [UEFI OS] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface#Compatibility_Support_Module)

I Disabled Secure Boot and for (2) look for "CSM" or "Legacy" Boot support.

Aditya
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user198250
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Check that your firmware has not reloaded defaults. Making sure usb is selected as bootable device in boot device order/priority settings. Never flash your firmware if there is no obvious reason to. If windows boots and works as expected (try mounting usb drive in windows to make sure system can see it) then you probably have no need to flash firmware. It is safer to flash firmware out with Windows or how manufacturer describes at their website. Methodically go through all firmware settings to make sure all hardware settings are appropriately configured.

It may be that Grub can not use the efi image that is on your usb due to how your hardware implements UEFI specification. Which means if you do get usb to boot the legacy/bios installer will run. Which would then mean you have to run boot-repair in order to install grub-efi and possibly make other changes to the legacy install to make it use uefi to boot. Can you remember seeing a black background with grub options to install or try Ubuntu when you did get usb to boot? See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI#Identifying_if_the_computer_boots_the_Ubuntu_DVD_in_EFI_mode to see an easy way to identify if Ubuntu usb has booted using uefi or legacy mode from installation media.

Some firmwares only recognise DVD media with efi files. Try burning and booting a DVD using UEFI settings.

The usb flash drive you are using could be being detected by firmware as a hard drive. Try selecting hard drive from one time boot menu and see what devices are named there at boot time to eliminate/prove this possibility.

Following the guide in reply to this question should get you going in the right direction.

Community
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geezanansa
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  • Thanks for answering. my PC came with Win8 pre-installed. As I said I already did a full Ubuntu install with the same USB which is not working now. The only diff b/w prev successful install and now is that prev I dwnld the iso image from main Ubuntu Site http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop but the image that is dwnld is Ubuntu-12.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso, does it mean that I should be installed on a AMD machine and not on Intel machine? Now I downloaded an explicit i386 iso from Panguin http://releases.ubuntu.com/precise/. Could this be the reason why my BIOS cannot see the USB as bootable? – user180630 Aug 06 '13 at 03:58
  • amd64 is for any 64 bit machine. There is also a mac64 version. If you want to install UEFI (which should be the case if windows allready uses UEFI) you have better chances with 64bit iso – geezanansa Aug 06 '13 at 04:08
  • Yes, as i suspected the problem was with the .iso image file. I downloaded the UEFI image(even though it was named as amd64), and now my PC detects. Thanks for your inputs – user180630 Aug 06 '13 at 13:48