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I am working on the installation for Mint 17 and need to understand what is going on with my Windows 8.1 booting. Here is an image showing all partitions from Windows:

http://i.imgur.com/Xvf5OjE.png

As you can see the EFI patition is 100% free space, and "Boot" is included in the status message for the C partition.

In these instructions the author suggests changing the "efi" parition to EFI Boot partition using the "Change" option. However, I do not have an "efi" partition in under my available partitions in the Mint installation.

If I create root, home, and swap partitions, and click "Install Now" I get the following error:

The partition table format in use on your disks normally requires you to create a separate partition for boot loader code. This partition should be marked for use as a "Reserved BIOS boot area" and should be at least 1MB in size.

UPDATE >> It looks like I do have an EFI system partition, but Mint isn't recognizing it as such, and is not providing the option to "Change" to "EFI Boot partition" selected.

mint@mint ~ $ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA TOSHIBA THNSNS25 (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 256GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt

Number  Start   End    Size    File system  Name                          Flags
 1      1049kB  316MB  315MB   ntfs         Basic data partition          hidden, diag
 2      316MB   588MB  273MB   fat32        EFI system partition          boot
 3      588MB   722MB  134MB                Microsoft reserved partition  msftres
 4      722MB   123GB  123GB   ntfs         Basic data partition          msftdata
 5      245GB   246GB  472MB   ntfs                                       hidden, diag
 6      246GB   254GB  8389MB  ntfs         Basic data partition          hidden, diag
 7      254GB   256GB  2147MB               Basic data partition          hidden

How should I proceed?

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2 Answers 2

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Well, I figured out the issue. I created a bootable USB drive that wasn't configured to launch via UEFI. I used Rufus to remedy the problem by selecting "GPT partition for UEFI computers" when creating the USB. Once I went back into the Mint installation, I was able to change the efi partition, as suggested by the tutorial I referenced above. After re-installing Mint, there was a problem. I went straight to the grub command prompt, rather than the OS selection screen. I was able to remedy this using the boot-repair app for Ubuntu, and now have the OS screen. I deselected "secure boot" when repairing grub using boot-repair.

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I think I had the same problem installing dual boot with Windows 10, but perhaps solved it in a simpler way. There was no efi partition (or at least it wasn't labelled as such).

I restarted my PC and through the bios selected the quick boot option of "UEFI: .... 7681MB" instead of the non-UEFI 7681MB option, which was what I believe I initially selected.

When installing Mint and chose to set up my partitions manually, this seemed to cause the efi partition to appear. As I believe I'm meant to, I selected that option when clicking "Install Now".

Note: My initial attempt at installation failed. After that, installation failed again even when selecting the efi partition for installation. The issue was that installation hung at an early stage while displaying message "Removing conflicting operating system files". To get past this I had to select the "Format" option for my root (/) partition, at which point installation was successful.

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