I am working on the installation for Mint 17 and need to understand what is going on with my Windows 8.1 booting. Here is an image showing all partitions from Windows:
As you can see the EFI patition is 100% free space, and "Boot" is included in the status message for the C partition.
In these instructions the author suggests changing the "efi" parition to EFI Boot partition using the "Change" option. However, I do not have an "efi" partition in under my available partitions in the Mint installation.
If I create root, home, and swap partitions, and click "Install Now" I get the following error:
The partition table format in use on your disks normally requires you to create a separate partition for boot loader code. This partition should be marked for use as a "Reserved BIOS boot area" and should be at least 1MB in size.
UPDATE >> It looks like I do have an EFI system partition, but Mint isn't recognizing it as such, and is not providing the option to "Change" to "EFI Boot partition" selected.
mint@mint ~ $ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA TOSHIBA THNSNS25 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 256GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 316MB 315MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag
2 316MB 588MB 273MB fat32 EFI system partition boot
3 588MB 722MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres
4 722MB 123GB 123GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata
5 245GB 246GB 472MB ntfs hidden, diag
6 246GB 254GB 8389MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag
7 254GB 256GB 2147MB Basic data partition hidden
How should I proceed?
Best Answer
Well, I figured out the issue. I created a bootable USB drive that wasn't configured to launch via UEFI. I used Rufus to remedy the problem by selecting "GPT partition for UEFI computers" when creating the USB. Once I went back into the Mint installation, I was able to change the efi partition, as suggested by the tutorial I referenced above. After re-installing Mint, there was a problem. I went straight to the grub command prompt, rather than the OS selection screen. I was able to remedy this using the boot-repair app for Ubuntu, and now have the OS screen. I deselected "secure boot" when repairing grub using boot-repair.