Anybody know UEFI?

brooklynzoo81

Hello all.

Recently i got a Dell XPS 13 from work, and noticed that it has the option for UEFI. Now being that i got my A+ back in 2001 and with the rapid change in technology i am still in the BIOS age for now. All of my home machines still use BIOS and since this ultrabook has UEFI what better opportunity than to learn now about it now. Can somebody guide me to a proper website or share their experience with it? I am looking to do a dual boot with Windows 8.1/Ubuntu x64. So far googling and youtube have only shown me very little how on to actually set this up properly. When i enabled UEFI it shows the Windows boot manager as the only boot option and that's it.

Asif Dasl

Unified Extensible Firmware Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UEFI broke most of my old tools, like BartPE and some memtesting software which has since been updated for UEFI.

Biggest problem I had with UEFI was with Secure Boot, you might need to disable that to install Linux.

I don't have that laptop so I couldn't tell you what you need to change in the BIOS to get everything working but try Secure Boot first.

tprice5

Overall I like UEFI, except my computers are connected to my living room tv and for some reason it defaults everything to a super big picture so it looks like its zoomed in 500% to where I can't see any of the other options. As a result, I have to swap in a monitor when I am troubleshooting in the bios.
It's annoying but I think it may just be my model of motherboard. My previous did the same thing but I was able to alter some setting that fixed it. No luck with this one.

DoubleNNs

I don't understand UEFI too well, BUT I do own that computer. You need UEFI enabled to use WIndows 8. However, as Asif suggested, you would probably want to disable secure boot in order to dual boot w/ Linux. You should be all set from there - just hit F12 while the computer boots up to access your Linux boot USB device. (Windows 8 boots so fast you have barely a second to get a successful press lol.)

I wiped Windows 8 off my XPS 13, but I'm currently typing from CentOS 7 w/ UEFI enabled.