Ubuntu installer and UEFI

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2020 at 18:13, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de> wrote:
>
> Hi
>
> The Ubuntu 18.04.3 installer seems to not support UEFI. It creates no
> EFI System Partition (ESP), and doesn't make a protective MBR. It looks
> like it supports MBR only. I've just used the default, "format hard
> disk and install ubuntu".
>
> This can't be, can it? Or is it because Ubuntu 18.04 is too old?
>
> How to tell the installer to make an UEFI system?

It depends on the machine. UEFI is unfortunately not well-standardised
yet. The PC industry thinks it is, because it only tests using
Windows.

Secondly, enterprise Linux vendors think it's fine, because:
• enterprise servers don't dual-boot
• enterprise server OSes rarely run on bare metal any more  but only in VMs
• enterprise vendors can happily pay for their code to be signed, so
it works in SecureBoot mode,
None of these things help those offering freeware FOSS OSes.

Ubuntu _supports_ UEFI fine, but depending on the PC you're using, and
its motherboard and/or firmware, and/or the version of that firmware,
you _may_ have to do the manual work necessary yourself.

This includes:
• creating a UEFI system partition to hold the system variables
• creating a GRUB BIOS-boot partition
• installing a UEFI shim correctly into the UEFI system partition
... and maybe more depending on system config.

This is hard and poorly-documented; see my comment about UEFI above.

On the (work) machine I am typing on right now, a colleague and I,
working together for some hours, and separately for several days each,
could not get the PC to boot off its own internal SATA hard disk with
plain Linux. At all. We tried every mainstream distro. Note, I work
for a Linux vendor.

In the end, I "fixed" it by installing Windows first. This booted
fine. Then I could add Linux in a dual- and triple-boot scenario no
problem at all.

Since then, upgrades to both Windows *and* Linux have separately left
the  system unbootable more than once. Latest was today.

This is (part of) what I mean when I say UEFI is immature and not
well-standardised.

I can't give you comprehensive advice as I don't know what PC you
have, and I have only fought with this myself on 4-5 different
machines and the answers from any one did not help with the others.

Secondly, I have previously advised you *not* to use disk technologies
such as volume groups and encryption, but you have refused this
advice. As such, I can't help.

All I can tell you is that with only 33 years of Unix experience
myself, I would not even _attempt_ to move a BIOS-installed system to
a UEFI machine. I would start over.

-- 
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