Ubuntu – How to boot into Live USB/CD with UEFI on latest Vaio S series

I was eventually able to solve this. I replaced the EFI/Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi with the grub64.efi. I renamed the former to bootmgfw.efi.old and used grub to add a menu option to chainload into it.

This implies that the firmware is hardcoded to look for the microsoft windows bootloader, and does not respect efibootmgr settings, or startup.nsh. That's really terrible.

I found out how the Sony EFI boot process works:

1. Look in /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/fwbootmgr.efi; if present, boot it.
2. Look in all sub-directories of /EFI/ for grubx64.efi. If present, boot it.
3. Boot /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi
4. Display an error message, such as "Operating System not found".

Under Linux, the efibootmgr tool does work, but it displays a lot of auto-generated nonsense, including the last USB drive you've used.

Here's how I learned all this:

1. I opened up my new machine and collapsed the Windows partition in order to install Linux and Mac side by side.
2. I installed Ubuntu 12.10 and the installer overwrote fwbootmgr.efi, backing up the old Windows bootloader.
3. I restored the old Windows bootloader, but couldn't boot anything except Windows.
4. I renamed the Windows bootloader to something bogus, and then the Grub BL took over.
5. I renamed the ubuntu directory to something else, and Grub still loaded, even though I had install rEFInd.

6. The only way I could get rEFInd to do what I wanted was this:

7. Move fwbootmgr.efi to its parent directory; rEFInd will still find it, and Windows won't complain that you renamed it.

8. Rename grubx64.efi to rfgrubx64.efi or something else recognizable.
9. Copy rEFInd from /EFI/refind to /EFI/boot, rename /EFI/refind_x64.efi to *.bak, and lastly rename /Boot/refind_x64.efi to bootx64.efi. You should now be able to boot the Windows BL or GRUB from rEFInd. I plan to upgrade my MacOS install to Clover, and load Clover from rEFInd as well.

(Perhaps it is possible to use the Windows Boot Manager to do all this, but EeasyBCD's EFI support is still a mess in my experience. I refuse to touch it again for a while.)

If you're using the grubx64.efi file from Ubuntu, in theory it should be looking on your Ubuntu /boot/grub directory for its support files. If it's not finding them, then I'm not sure what's wrong. If you've built GRUB from source code or installed in some other way, though, you might need to copy all its support files, as you suggest.

Another alternative is to install rEFInd as EFI/Microsoft/boot/bootmgfw.efi on the ESP and leave GRUB where it is (presumably EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi). With a little extra configuration (described on the rEFInd Web page), you should even be able to bypass GRUB completely, if it's giving you problems.

More broadly, you may want to check out my Web page on EFI boot loaders, which includes information on boot loader installation and at least the basics of configuring all of them. (GRUB 2 is the hardest in this respect. It's only easy when the distribution installer gets it right.)