Whoot! First successful UEFI install of Ubuntu!
I recently won an auction at shopgoodwill.com for an HP p7 1180t. Nice capacity at least. I took the 4g RAM stick and the 1tb drive out of the dead A10, and both those items work fine. The video is still being a bit of a bugaboo. More on that later.
It's not documented anywhere, but I'm suspecting that this desktop's BIOS is set up to accept only Micro$oft MBRs on a hard drive. This isn't so bad for a data drive, but it's absolutely murder for trying to install the OS. It took me three different versions of Ubuntu and probably over ten installs before I finally came upon the correct process.
Now for the video. It seems like a second quirk in the BIOS is that it won't allow for a VGA out. I have two video cards I've tried like that, and of course the only input I have for my monitor is VGA. So next step is to try a DVI to VGA adapter out of the DVI port on the card and see what that does. It does work on the TV, with HDMI. So, something's obviously working. I suppose if all else fails, find a monitor with HDMI in, and go at it that way.
It's not documented anywhere, but I'm suspecting that this desktop's BIOS is set up to accept only Micro$oft MBRs on a hard drive. This isn't so bad for a data drive, but it's absolutely murder for trying to install the OS. It took me three different versions of Ubuntu and probably over ten installs before I finally came upon the correct process.
- Create a small, say 100mb partition as the first one as an EFI partition.
- Have Ubuntu install GRUB onto that same partition, rather than the MBR.
- Install OS on second created partition, set up other partitions according to taste.
Now for the video. It seems like a second quirk in the BIOS is that it won't allow for a VGA out. I have two video cards I've tried like that, and of course the only input I have for my monitor is VGA. So next step is to try a DVI to VGA adapter out of the DVI port on the card and see what that does. It does work on the TV, with HDMI. So, something's obviously working. I suppose if all else fails, find a monitor with HDMI in, and go at it that way.