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I decided to migrate from Ubuntu 13.10 to 12.04 LTS, so I have downloaded .iso image and wrote it to my USB-stick. During the installation, on a stage of partitioning hard drive, I met one problem.

I have two big partitions (Windows partition, partition for Files) and it's all clear about them. But I also have two small partitions. The first one is FAT32, 100MiB size and in it there are Windows bootloader files, Ubuntu bootloader files. The second one is 128MiB size, unknown filesystem, "msftres" flag.

What should I do in order to correctly install Ubuntu? As I know, I should choose the first 100MiB FAT32-partition as a EFI-partition, but I am afraid that Windows bootloader files will be destroyed. Please, help me.

LiveWireBT
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Krosis
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  • You are right, you should choose the first one that contains the bootloader files. The windows bootloader shouldn't be overwritten. let's see if I can setup something in VirtualBox and give you proper installation logs. – LiveWireBT Feb 15 '14 at 08:06
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    You can always back up the EFI System Partition (ESP; your 100MiB FAT32 partition). A file-level backup (using cp, tar, or the like) should be sufficient. In fact, I recommend making such a backup before installing in EFI mode. – Rod Smith Feb 15 '14 at 18:22

2 Answers2

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If there's already an efi partition, you do not need to do any thing. Just mount it to /boot/efi. Then installer should do everything for you.

For me, sda3 is \efi and sda8 is /boot, so what I need to do is

mount /dev/sda8 /boot
mkdir /boot/efi && mount /dev/sda3 /boot/efi

finally it looks like:

housezet@arch: ~
$ lsblk
NAME    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda       8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1    8:1    0   260M  0 part 
├─sda2    8:2    0   1.5G  0 part 
├─sda3    8:3    0   260M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda4    8:4    0   128M  0 part 
├─sda5    8:5    0 845.1G  0 part /home/win
├─sda6    8:6    0   392M  0 part 
├─sda7    8:7    0  33.9G  0 part 
├─sda8    8:8    0   500M  0 part /boot
├─sda9    8:9    0  19.5G  0 part /
├─sda11   8:11   0    27G  0 part /home
└─sda12   8:12   0     3G  0 part [SWAP]
sr0      11:0    1  1024M  0 rom

and 

housezet@arch: ~
$ ls /boot
efi  initramfs-linux.img  vmlinuz-linux

For 'msftres' flags, refer to this question: Is it safe to format msftres, msftdata and hidden partitions?

Community
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House Zet
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In 12.04 you should not choose the guided option to install along side Windows, as that will create a 2nd EFI System Partition (ESP). (To my knowledge there should only be one ESP per hard drive, but I may be wrong on that or implementations differ.)

Instead choose to manually specify the partition layout and choose to use the existing ESP that already contains the Windows bootloader files as the ESP of your Ubuntu installation. By choosing that predefined option, the partition will not be formatted (the checkbox is disabled) and Ubuntu's bootloader files should only be copied to \EFI\ubuntu\. \EFI\Boot\ and \EFI\Microsoft\ directories should be left untouched.

Backing up contents of the ESP as suggested by @RodSmith is always a good idea. If something goes wrong you could just copy the files back and if the Windows boot entry itself got deleted you could add it back with efibootmgr or bcfg via UEFI shell. But Ubuntu's installer only creates UEFI bootmenu entries, it doesn't delete any of them. You can also run bcdboot to repair a broken BCD configuration from another Windows installation or installation media.

LiveWireBT
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