No EFI boot on Dell Inspiron One 2330

[Charles Boling]

(Info taken from my forum post http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=12368306 )

64-bit Quantal Quetzal seems to run fine on this machine -- as long as I configure the machine for "Legacy Boot Mode" (thus not allowing me to access Dell's Windows 8 installation).

Note that you actually have to be in full legacy mode (No EFI allowed); if you specify a legacy boot while in UEFI mode, you're told that there are no boot devices available. Manually specifying a UEFI boot when in Legacy mode fails the same as when in "pure" UEFI mode (described below).

The behavior when attempting to boot via UEFI is the same whether booting from the DVD, USB, or hard drive (also same whether or not Secure Boot is enabled):

GRUB comes up fine, but upon choosing any of the Linux options (Windows still loads fine), it goes to a blank screen with the same color as the menu background (black or purple, depending on whether you boot from removable or fixed drives), and hangs. When booting from a USB stick I can see about 3 seconds of additional activity (blinking R/W light) after the menu text disappears, but then no further sign of life. Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing. Pressing the power button immediately turns the machine off.

Initially, I thought it was maybe only a problem when booting from removable media, so I used legacy mode to install to the hard drive, after shrinking the Windows partition to make room. I installed GRUB to the Linux root partition, then used Boot-Repair to help me convert it to an EFI install. I had to manually copy the EFI loader file to the appropriate directory/name (BOOT/BOOTx64.EFI) on the EFI partition, then the machine booted to GRUB fine. As I said above, I can load Windows via GRUB, but anything involving the Linux kernel is dead.

Boot-Repair report: http://paste.ubuntu.com/1375656/

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for grub2 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]