Dual Booting Windows 8 and Ubuntu 13.04

After much time trying lots of different things, I succeeded in getting my HP2000 AMD 64 bit laptop to dual boot both Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 8.

The key was to use a GUI program called boot-repair from a live USB Ubuntu session after installing Ubuntu, and run the recommended repairs from the GUI:



Here's a summary of what I consider the important steps, but not necessarily the path I followed, since I tried lots of things that proved to be dead ends. I have still got to undo some of these and see what happens, including resetting various BIOS secure boot and UEFI parameters.

Note: I just disabled the legacy support boot option in the BIOS and the pc refused to boot. I re-enabled legacy support and all is well again.

First I downloaded the Ubuntu 13.04 iso image.

Next I created a USB drive with the image using Windows Universal USB Installer (WUBI) version 1.9.3.6, from Windows 8. The persistent feature never worked, but that was only a minor inconvenience. Also, that installer requires a match between the names of the OS and the iso file name which might require renaming the iso. For instance in an earlier WUBI the iso had to have a name starting with "raring-", otherwise no file will show up on the iso selection window.

Next, I booted the USB and installed it, after creating an 8 GB partition from space taken from the Windows partition space. You might want to create this partition under windows itself using the partition manager administrative tool, from control panel-> administrative tools. To find it bring up control panel and search for "partition". Click "Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions" to bring up the GUI.

The system did not boot to a screen showing grub 2 os listings with Windows and Ubuntu.  Windows booted directly. Much time was spent figuring this out.

Finally I ran the boot-repair as mentioned above. I installed it from a live Ubuntu USB session using the instructions on the website. Lots of stuff happened and I followed the program's directions as given, often copying and pasting commends into a terminal window. Then the screen went haywire, and in desperation I finally powered the pc down by pushing the power button for 5 seconds.

Upon powering up, voila, grub 2 came up and provided choices for booting, including Windows 8 and several Ubuntu versions. Both windows uefi and ubuntu booted properly.

Last, I changed the boot order so Windows was first by changing the GRUB_DEFAULT value in /etc/default/grub to 3 from 0, then ran the update-grub command to regenerate the grub.cfg file from the grub scripts and the grub file I just changed. You sort of have to guess here, by noting the order of systems in the boot list when booting. I noticed Windows UEFI was third on this list, so I changed GRUB_DEFAULT to 3.

Anyway, things are working as of this evening.

The list of what did not work to get the pc to boot properly is long and hard to recall at this time.