Comment 6 for bug 1557894

Finally, I realised that the USB stick was probably getting "lost" at the same time as my USB keyboard. However, I didn't need to pop the stick because I could manually mount it under busybox. Unfortunately, I didn't know how to make casper restart once it had given up!

Now for the good news - how I installed ubuntu 16.04 beta2 (only useful for stubborn people!)...

First, I re-enabled the CSM (Compatibility Support Manager component of the UEFI BIOS) by accessing BIOS from windows (you really need to keep windows until ubuntu is properly installed!) I then booted my legacy-bios knoppix 7.0 USB system. I used gparted to create four new partitions on the solid state disk - I had previously shrunk the windows partiton using its disk manager. My new partitions were for linux-swap, / and /boot (both ext4), and a 2GB unformatted partition. I then used knoppix to DD the ubuntu live iso image onto the new unmounted unformatted partition.

When I rebooted the machine to windows I found that I was able to restart using the "device" which was my live iso from its new SDD partition. The system BIOS (not sure whether the CSM or UEFI component was responsible) was happy to recognise the hybrid iso on the SDD, and process its contents. It apparently found the grub2 efi file in my partition, because I hadn't already copied it to /dev/sda1/EFI/BOOT/. The presence of a grub menu proved the BIOS had booted the efi "personality" of the live iso. I selected the "install ubuntu" menu option, and the installer started running. I told it to use the boot, root and swap partitions I had already prepared and installation ran OK.

I crossed my fingers when I was prompted to restart the system, and was very relieved to find my new ubuntu system booted successfully. The wifi connection came up (no ethernet port on my machine) and I ran apt-get update and upgrade without a hitch. I then installed gparted to examine the disk - the three original partitions were intact (EFI, windows recovery and windows C:). I was very impressed to see that ubuntu had automatically mounted the /dev/sda1 EFI partition on its own /boot/efi/ path, and grub had been installed into the "real" EFI partition.

The default grub installation had successfully created a directory structure on sda1 which allowed me to boot windows and the BIOS. I changed grub.cfg (on sda1) to not hide its menu and use a long timeout. I then confirmed I could use grub to boot windows, ubuntu (again!) and even the system BIOS menu. I disabled the CSM and rebooted to grub and then into ubuntu.

Everything was working normally with minimal effort, so a lot of hard work from others has made the 16.04 installation process work brilliantly with EFI and co-existence with windows. The only hurdle is bypassing this problem of running the live iso from a usb stick. I still can't do that!