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Most or all of the AskUbuntu posts on this subject seem to wind up talking about either USB keys or CD's. I know Ubuntu 14.10 doesn't fit on a CD, and I don't have a USB drive.

I'm running Windows 8.1 on a Dell "Inspiron" laptop. Firmware is UEFI, SecureBoot is turned off. I have set the "Priorities" on the Setup screen to #1=UEFI OS, 2=Windows Boot Manager. I don't really know what that means. I haven't found the "Boot Order" selection I used to see with BIOS.

I have downloaded "ubuntu-14.10-desktop-amd64.iso"

Right-clicking on the ISO and selecting "Send to DVD RW Drive" is no good -- the disk contains only one file, the ISO itself.

I opened the ISO using "Mount as Virtual Drive" and tried to copy the files in it onto the DVD drive. Seemed to burn alright, but when I boot the firmware powers up the DVD but seems to simply ignore it.

Reading about UEFI, it seems to require a FAT-type format on the boot device. I have not been able to find any way to "format" a DVD as FAT. The Windows "Format a DVD" dialog has a "Format Options => Create an MS-DOS startup disk" section, but it is always greyed out.

How can I make the DVD so that UEFI firmware "likes" it, and are there other options on the Setup panel (or elsewhere) I should look at?

David A Cobb
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1 Answers1

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If you burn the Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10 x64 ISO image correctly, then the result should be a UEFI bootable DVD.

There may be issues with the firmware not allowing to boot from DVD via UEFI, firmware bugs/incompatibilities or an unclear user interface.

Simply copying the data from the ISO image to a USB stick would be the easier way to create UEFI only live media.

More technical detail

Reading about UEFI, it seems to require a FAT-type format on the boot device. I have not been able to find any way to "format" a DVD as FAT.

The solution to this is El Torito.

Very short explanation: The ISO image contains a boot catalog with one or more files to boot from. For UEFI it's an image with the FAT filesystem containing the EFI loaders. The image is like a disk dump created with dd.

$ mkdir iso-img
$ mkdir efi-img

$ sudo mount Ubuntu-14.04.1-desktop-amd64.iso iso-img

$ file iso-img/boot/grub/efi.img
iso-img/boot/grub/efi.img: x86 boot sector

$ sudo mount iso-img/boot/grub/efi.img efi-img

$ ll efi-img/efi/boot/
total 2298
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    2048 Jul  21  2014 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    2048 Jul  21  2014 ../
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1355736 Jul  21  2014 bootx64.efi*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  993144 Jul  21  2014 grubx64.efi*

$ mount | grep efi-img
/home/livewire/Downloads/iso-img/boot/grub/efi.img on /home/livewire/Downloads/efi-img type vfat (ro)
LiveWireBT
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  • Urm. I'm running Windows, so the Bourne Shell excerpt isn't much help. El-Torito is a specification, and a 1997 spec at that -- UEFI is newer, I think. Anyway, at this point I need software not a spec. If you can show how to do that, given my limited environment, it would be better. – David A Cobb Feb 09 '15 at 23:51
  • A different forum pointed me to [windows] diskpart.exe. It looks as though that might let me format the DVD, except that "LIST DISK" doesn't see the DVD. LIST VOLUMES does see it at Volume 0, but I cannot CLEAN it because it says there is no disk at that location. – David A Cobb Feb 10 '15 at 00:29