Comment 158 for bug 1040557

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 6:16 AM, Ivo Roghair <email address hidden> wrote:
> I found out about this bugreport _after_ installing Ubuntu 12.10 64-bit
> on my Samsung Ultrabook Series 5 530U3C-A09NL.
>
> I installed Ubuntu via usb (created via unetbootin on another 12.10
> machine), with secureboot off but UEFI on (exclusively UEFI).
> Immediately after installation, I transferred an apt-clone file from my
> old machine to my Samsung and installed all {packages,sources,debs}. I
> also updated apt further, and it told me to autoremove packages like
> grub-efi-amd64-bin, efibootmgr and so on. I am now on kernel 3.5.0-25,
> and it seems OK.
>
> There's also Windows 8 in the grub boot menu, but after reading these
> reports I am a bit reluctant to boot it. Ubuntu boots fine, though.
> There's no sign of any samsung-laptop module in /etc/modprobe.d, nor in
> lsmod. I tried to change UEFI to CMS in bios, but that leaves me
> basically without any bootable OS. My question is, why is my machine not
> bricked? It is bound to happen after some powercycles, should I
> reinstall everything to be sure or is this issue fixed?

Your machine has not been bricked because you haven't had a kernel
OOPS which, when booted via UEFI, saves logs via UEFI variables. You
also haven't had too many (or too large) UEFI variables created by any
number of other possible processes in GNU/Linux and Windows when
booted via UEFI. You don't need to re-install Ubuntu to enable booting
via BIOS, you just need to install the grub-pc package, "sudo apt-get
install grub-pc" (and correctly select the disk, not any partition, as
an install device when prompted). I don't know the process for
Windows.