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Booting both Legacy and UEFI OS on PC

2016-01-30
2016-01-30
  • allesverloren20

    allesverloren20 - 2016-01-30

    First off, big thanks to Rod who created this software and is a huge help to linux beginners in the forums. Thanks. :)

    Ive been reading til my eyes hurt and cant find a solution to my problem. To give you some background: I would love to dual boot with ubuntu and win7.. So I wiped everything and installed Windows 7 in EFI clean. Worked fine. With Ubuntu, not so much.. I could boot it in EFI but none of the options worked; I could not start ubuntu install or live os. Just get a black screen for 10 minutes. No error message.

    The ONLY WAY I managed to install ubuntu was by choosing the LEGACY option for live testing environment xforcevesa and proceeding to install it from within the OS. Which, since I didnt install both windows and ubuntu in EFI, leads to> no boot option for grub after installation completed.

    SO, after looking around quite a bit I couldnt find anything that exactly resembled my problem so I chose to install Refind which should be able to show me both boot options BUT installing it wasnt enough. If you got an EFI PC and want options to boot both legacy and EFI OS you apparently have to configure the boot manager to look for legacy and not just EFI. Im decent at reading instructions but I cant get my head around this one. Found some info on the website but I fear I Im lost. http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/configfile.html

    Whats the best way to tackle this problem as a beginner. Should I approach this in another way? Or can someone explain to an idiot how I make the refind boot manager show my legacy os? All it shows is windows. It does however show the legacy option for ubuntu live usb.

    Id like to add that the problem with a black screen when booting in EFI is the same when I try to use the Boot Repair tool. Cant use the tool in live OS either since I can only boot that through legacy which boot repair doesnt approve of. The only thing I managed to install in EFI was windows 7.

    Any help, deeply appreciated.

     
  • Roderick W. Smith

    In refind.conf:

    scanfor internal,external,optical,manual,hdbios
    

    Also, chances are your problem with EFI-mode booting of Linux can be corrected by adjusting the options passed to the kernel. Video problems like that tend to be very card-specific, and I don't happen to be familiar with every variant. The nomodeset option is the most common one that works with multiple cards, though.

     
  • allesverloren20

    allesverloren20 - 2016-01-30

    Thank you so much for the quick reply. I did try the nomodeset option first thing but it now occured to me to see if I really edited correctly... I did not. Hours wasted. I am now dual booting. God bless everyone.

     

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