Ubuntu – 12.04 Fails to install grub-efi to /target/

12.04grub2partitioninguefi

I have a Lenovo u410 ultrabook. It's sata scheme consists of a 30gb SSD and a 1tb hdd in a raid0 with intel rapid start technology. I removed IRST and disabled the raid0. I want to install ubuntu on the ssd and /home/ on the 1gb hdd. I foolishly erased the efi partition on the 1tb and attempted to recreate it by formatting the ssd and creating a new GPT partition table. I made a 250mb fat32 partition (/dev/sda1) and filled the rest ~24gb with an ext4 partition (/dev/sda2)

I made a live USB using a 12.04.2 iso and universal usb installer. The installation completes fine however at the end I get the error "Failed to install grub-efi to /target/ the system will not boot".
I tried to open terminal and update grub however it's not there and when trying to install grub-efi from the repo I get flagged for missing a lot of dependencies. Ubiquity crashes after the error message.

I had success a few months ago installed 12.10 using my friends usb cd drive however I broke the system and cant be down until I next see him. Is there a huge difference in 12.10 and LTS that would stop this install from working smoothly?

My net goal is to have Ubuntu running on the machine with steam (tf2 and bastion) and eclipse IDE. If 12.10 is better suited, and can solve this efi issue then I'll gladly install that however from my understanding LTS would be more stable and still run the modern updates of Quantal.

Will 12.10 install grub-efi flawlessly? and if not how can I install grub-efi from the live usb onto a solid state drive /dev/sda with efi boot on /dev/sda1, ext4 mounted as root on /dev/sda2, and /home/ on the hard disk /dev/sdb2?

Conclusion:
LTS wasn't capable of handling the uefi environment. Downloading and installing 12.10 worked flawlessly. Raring worked fine too, however it was unstable with the drivers necessary for steam.

Hardware: Lenovo U410 ultrabook
HDs: 30 GB SSD, 1 T HDD with raid0
Ubuntu: 12.04

Best Answer

Ubuntu's been making slow but steady improvements in its EFI support for the last several versions, so yes, there are differences between 12.04 and 12.10 that could be important. That said, the fact that you got a bunch of dependency errors when you tried to install grub-efi suggests that a more fundamental problem might be the root cause -- perhaps there was a network problem that prevented a string of other packages from installing, for instance. If so, trying again at a later time might correct matters.

That said, on an EFI system, IMHO it's better to use 12.10 than 12.04. This is especially true if it's a recent computer that shipped with Windows 8, since such computers also invariably use Secure Boot, which Ubuntu 12.10 supports but Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't. This isn't the root cause of your problem, though, since 12.04's installation disc won't boot at all if Secure Boot is active; I mention it only for the benefit of others who might read this page.

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