I was not aware of booting mode and installed ubuntu on my new x64,4 gb ram, Acer ES15 laptop in legacy mode. I read about the feature of uefi mode and would like to switch to uefi. When I boot on legacy mode, ubuntu loads up and system works fine, but when I change my bios setting to uefi it says no bootable device found. Should I install ubuntu again using uefi mode after erasing data? Will that work?…. Is there any other way to get to uefi mode or I need to format and then install ubuntu again using uefi bios mode? Please, help.
Ubuntu – How to change ubuntu install from legacy to uefi
biosbootgrub-legacyuefi
Related Solutions
First, one question is why you want to switch to EFI-mode booting. Based on your gdisk output, it looks like you've got a single-OS installation, so you don't seem to need to coexist with something else. If you can boot in BIOS/CSM/legacy mode already, why switch? As the saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." (OTOH, I see no BIOS Boot Partition, so maybe you can't currently boot in BIOS mode....)
Supposing you have a reason to boot in EFI mode, though, let's start at the beginning....
YUMI is not the only tool for creating a bootable USB flash drive. You can also do it with dd, UNetbootin, Startup Disk Creator, Rufus, and other tools. All of the tools I've named are capable of creating an EFI-bootable USB flash drive, with the caveat that EFI implementations differ, so what works on one might not work on another. Some tools also have options that can affect how well a created disk will work, either in general or on a specific EFI. Thus, creating your installation disk with another tool should enable you to boot it in EFI mode (assuming, of course, that your computer uses an EFI rather than a traditional BIOS). That said, if you've already installed, re-creating your boot medium and re-installing is overkill....
If you have no other bootable OS on the computer, one solution is to install an EFI boot loader as EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi on the EFI System Partition (ESP; your /dev/sda1). This is easily done if you're installing by hand, but if you're using a tool like grub-install, you'll have to move files around manually after the fact. Specifically, the EFI version of grub-install will put GRUB in EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi (perhaps with shimx64.efi in the same directory). You'll have to copy files to the right location to get them to launch when you boot the computer. If Secure Boot is inactive, copy EFI/ubuntu/grubx64.efi to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi. You might also need to copy EFI/ubuntu/grub.cfg to EFI/BOOT/grub.cfg, too. If Secure Boot is active, it gets more complex; you must copy shimx64.efi to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi and copy grubx64.efi to EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi. (Note that all these filenames are relative to the ESP's root, so if you were to mount partitions as shown in your /etc/fstab, you must add /boot/efi/ to the start of each path.) With a boot loader installed to EFI/BOOT/bootx64.efi and nothing else referenced in the NVRAM entries, your computer should boot from that "fallback" filename.
Another option is to prepare an Ubuntu installer using one of the tools I mentioned earlier, then boot it in EFI mode. With that done, you should be able to run Boot Repair in EFI mode, so it should be able to set up GRUB in that mode. In fact, even in BIOS mode, Boot Repair should be able to copy EFI files as described in the previous paragraph. (I'm not sure how well this works in practice, though; Boot Repair might just try to do a BIOS-mode repair and not attempt to set up an EFI fallback boot loader.)
Yet another option is to use my rEFInd boot manager to get the process started. You can download the CD-R or USB flash drive version of rEFInd and boot from it. rEFInd should detect your Linux kernel(s) and enable you to boot. If this works, you'll be booted in EFI mode, and you can then install the rEFInd PPA or Debian package to use it permanently (without the USB drive); or you can install GRUB via grub-install and it should set things up correctly. (Note that you'll need the EFI GRUB package, grub-efi, installed for grub-install to set up the EFI version of GRUB.) Whether you install rEFInd or GRUB in this way, it will be able to set up an EFI NVRAM entry, since the boot from the rEFInd USB drive will be into EFI mode, thus enabling the OS to add EFI NVRAM variables.
I also have a Laptop whose motherboard BIOS supports both Legacy and UEFI Boot options.
I use RUFUS as a utility to create bootable media for both Linux and Windows platforms. It has options such as Partition scheme and target system type which creates the bootable media for below mentioned types.
- MBR Partition scheme for BIOS (Legacy) and UEFI
- MBR Partition scheme for UEFI
- GPT Partition scheme for UEFI
And also for specific type of ISO files supported with EFI-CSM , the utility is able to create bootable media accordingly.
To create a bootable USB that supports both Legacy and UEFI Boot options proceed as follows.
- Open Rufus utility.
- Select the USB drive onto which you want to create the live bootable media.
- In order to support both UEFI and Legacy boot select the first option i.e MBR Partition scheme for BIOS and UEFI under partition scheme and target system type.
- Select file system as FAT32 and Default Cluster size.
- Tick the box with Create a bootable disk using and browse for the ISO file.
- Click START and wait for it to complete.
After completion boot the USB on any PC and you will see that it provides option to boot through LEGACY and also through UEFI.
(NOTE: Ensure that your BIOS settings have been set to allow Legacy Boot options and not strictly UEFI.)
Here is a picture of how it works.!
Best Answer
You can re-install Ubuntu, as Pilot6 suggests, and this may be acceptable if you haven't done much customization or created many user files in Ubuntu; however, it's pretty easy to install an EFI-mode boot loader for Linux. The two easiest methods are:
Method 1:
/sys/firmware/efi. If it's present, you've booted in EFI mode and can continue; but if it's absent, you've booted in BIOS mode and should review your firmware settings and how you created the boot medium.Method 2:
EDIT:
I thought you were dual-booting with Windows, but when I re-read your question, I didn't see this explicitly stated. If you're dual-booting with Windows, the above procedures should both work as-is. If you do not have a dual-boot with Windows, though, your computer may lack an EFI System Partition (ESP) and it may even use the Master Boot Record (MBR) partitioning system rather than the GUID Partition Table (GPT). If so, I recommend that you convert from MBR to GPT (if necessary), as described here. You will also need to create an ESP, which you can do with GParted using an emergency disk. You'll need to shrink an existing partition by about 550 MiB, create a new FAT32 partition in the freed space, and mark it ask an ESP by giving it a "boot" or "esp" flag (in GParted) or assigning it a type code of EF00 (in
gdisk). Note that the MBR-to-GPT conversion will destroy the current BIOS-mode boot loader, so if something goes wrong and you have problems getting EFI-mode booting working, it will be harder to return to BIOS-mode booting.