Help me installing Linux on a UEFI only Notebook

Question

So my friend got a Odys Trendbook 14 Pro notebook really cheap. He planned to install Elementary OS on it. But now we come to the problem.

He cant boot from his USB he made with rufus. The only option in the bios he has is secure boot and that is disabled. no settings for fast boot or legacy/csm. If he takes the usb as only boot device uefi shell starts. You know anyway to get around that? i heared that ms leaked something to bypass uefi but no idea how that works exactly. Edit: Yes we tried normal ubuntu too Here some pics of the bios: https://i.sstatic.net/PRb8O.jpg

I never had a problem like that and i would love to see a way to fix it thanks for any help!

Answer 1

I've looked into Rufus documentation and found this:

I used an UEFI bootable ISO based on grub, but all I get is the grub prompt

This can happen if you chose GPT partition scheme for UEFI computer in the Partition scheme dropdown, and part_gpt module was not included in grub when running grub-mkimage (See here).

In this case, you need to select MBR partition scheme for UEFI computer, and the grub.efi boot should work as expected.

You can find more here.

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Also, I've recently installed eOS Loki on my laptop with UEFI and Secure Boot active. I have created my liveUSB stick using another Linux distribution and the dd command.

The following should work on any Linux distribution

1. Check your disks and what device is your pen drive using lsblk command.

   You should see something like this:

In my case, /dev/sdb disk with 14.9G is my USB stick.

2. Now, all you have to do is use the dd magic.

   Use sudo dd if=/path-to-elementary.iso of=/dev/sdX status=progress - where X is your disk.

Note: the status=progress argument is not required, but it provides useful information about the progress of the liveUSB creation.

In the end you will be able to boot the elementary OS in a UEFI PC with Secure Boot enabled.