EFI partition and boot manager - dual boot windows 8 and ubuntu

Question

So, i bought a HP pavilion g6 laptop last year with windows 8 preinstalled and successfully installed ubuntu 13.04 on it . But every time i booted i had to press F9 to enter bios options and then from there i could choose between OS boot manager and ubuntu [ i was unable to force grub to take over the windows boot loader ].

Now recently i thought of installing ubuntu 14.04 . But what i want in the end is that grub takes on over the windows 8 boot loader and i donot have to press F9 every time i need to boot to ubuntu.

I have UEFI enabled and secure boot disabled . Using the EaseUS partition manager in windows , i explored the ESP [ EFI System Patition ].

What i found was the following :

1.The partiton has 2 folders - BOOT and EFI.

2.BOOT has only 1 file - BOOT.SDI

3.EFI has 4 folders - Microsoft , Boot , HP and ubuntu

4.Boot folder here has only 1 file - bootx64.efi , which on searching contents in other folders i found has the same filename as that contained in ./HP/EFI/Boot/

5.HP folder has 5 subfolders - SystemDiags, BIOSUpdate, BIOS , BOOT , EFI. The EFI folder here has 2 subfolders - Boot and Microsoft and it is the boot folder which contains BOOTX64.EFI.

So, my question is after i have reinstalled ubuntu on a separate partition , will the method given here : Windows 8 removes Grub as default boot manager , still work and allow me to choose between ubuntu and windows at start-up using grub ? Because i remember the last time i tried using it , it didn't work out ..

Also , out of curiosity , if i somehow remove the HP folder from ESP partition , then will this not be the same as having a DOS OS installed laptop , which now has no remains of HP ?

And one thing more if someone can please explain me why is it the case that windows boots by default and ubuntu's grub cannot be started ?

Answer 1

If you've tried using bcdedit in Windows, as described in the Windows 8 removes Grub as default boot manager question you cited, and if that doesn't work, then it won't work any better with Ubuntu 14.04 than with 13.04. Basically, what you're looking at now is a buggy firmware. You might check with HP to see if they've fixed that bug in a firmware update. (They probably call it a "BIOS," but really it isn't a BIOS; it's an EFI.)

If HP has no updated firmware, then given that your computer is too old to be returned to the store for a refund, your only choice is to find a workaround. One that's likely to work is to rename EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi to something else and rename your chosen boot manager to use that name. You can use the Advanced options tag in Boot Repair to do this automatically, or you can do it manually. Alternatively, if you switch to rEFInd as boot manager, you can use its mvrefind.sh script to do the job, as described here. Note that such a renaming operation is a very hackish workaround to a bug that should never have seen the light of day. The "fix" can in fact cause further problems down the line, or it might be undone by Windows if it notices that its boot loader has been overwritten. I strongly recommend you back up your ESP if you do this, so that you can restore it to a known-working state if something bad happens down the line. A file-level backup (using tar, cp, or whatnot) should be adequate.