Ubuntu – Are Sony Vaio S series or T series laptops compatible with both windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 in dual-boot installation

The following is a rip off from:

Sony VAIO with Insyde H2O EFI bios will not boot into GRUB EFI

This was done for a SONY VAIO S15 (2012) with 12.04 and it seems that everything works OK for me (like suspend from both OSes)

1. Make sure the machine is booting in UEFI mode not Legacy

2. Boot from Ubuntu US stick or CD

3. Make sure you selected the install the boot loader into Ubuntu partition

4. Install Ubuntu as usual.

5. Reboot but boot again from the stick

   sudo mkdir -p /mnt/efi_partition
   sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sda3  /mnt/efi_partition
   sudo cd /mnt/efi_partion/EFI/Microsoft/Boot
   sudo cp bootmgfw.efi bootmgfw.efi.old
   sudo cp /mnt/efi_partition/EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi bootmgfw.efi
   sudo reboot
   

   It should boot Ubuntu.

6. Now that it works, you must edit grub configuration to boot Windows 7

   emacs /etc/grub.d/40_custom
   

   Add at the end

   menuentry "Windows 7" {
       set root='(hd0,gpt3)'
       chainloader /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi
   }
   

   Then :

   sudo update-grub
   sudo reboot
   

You can get a feel of how Ubuntu looks like on your system by booting it using Ubuntu live CD or a Bootable USB drive, without making any change to your current Operating System. You can fiddle around with the OS and check if all or most of the drivers are detected correctly. In some cases it is possible that some drivers may not be available but there are work around which may not be very easy to follow for a new user to Linux.