Installation of Mint 18.2 on a Sony Vaio Pro 13"

[mightydimo]

How do i format the drive properly so i can install mint. Drive is a 128 Samsung SSD. It keeps crashing as i try to install it. I think the problem is there is 0 room for it to install. Best way to format the drive? I dont care about windows on this PC as ive since upgraded. Any help appreciated.

[deepakdeshp]

https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/293

[Brian Quinlan]

You don't say exactly what you mean by 'crash', but it seems that the main problem with installing Linux on a Sony Vaio Pro 13 is that Sony do something non-standard wrt EFI file locations. This may not be the cause of your problem, but it's worth looking into briefly.

The following worked for me recently when I wiped my SSD and reinstalled a new distro (Ubuntu Mate 17.10, but something very similar should apply for Mint also). Basically, when it failed to boot from the SSD, I booted from the Ubuntu installation USB key and copied/moved some file in the EFI partition (/dev/sda1 in my case - yours might be different). Note that I only run Linux, not dual-boot - I dunno if dual-boot requires anything different.

Code: Select all

ubuntu-mate@ubuntu-mate:~$ efibootmgr --verbose
BootCurrent: 0006
Timeout: 0 seconds
BootOrder: 0006,0005
Boot0005* Windows Boot Manager  HD(1,GPT,c67d1e5f-518d-4bad-813b-cb4ac455f3b1,0x800,0x100000)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi)
Boot0006* UEFI: SanDisk 1.26    PciRoot(0x0)/Pci(0x1d,0x0)/USB(1,0)/USB(2,0)/HD(1,MBR,0x60a5d455,0x347c68,0x1200)..BO

So the path where I want to put the shim (see https://askubuntu.com/a/342382) in the last command below is \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi.
I also needed to copy the contents of the ubuntu directory as shimx64.efi complained about not being able to find files if I only did the last command.

Code: Select all

ubuntu-mate@ubuntu-mate:~$ sudo su -
root@ubuntu-mate:~# cd /mnt
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt# mkdir sda1
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt# ls -l sda1
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 17  2017 Boot
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Apr 17  2017 EFI
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Apr 17  2017 Microsoft
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 17  2017 ubuntu

root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt# cd sda1/EFI/Microsoft/
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft# ls
Boot
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft# mv Boot/ Boot_save
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft# mkdir Boot
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft# cp -r ../ubuntu/* Boot
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft# ls -l Boot
total 4768
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root     108 Feb  4 01:32 BOOTX64.CSV
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1271672 Feb  4 01:32 MokManager.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   72144 Feb  4 01:32 fbx64.efi
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 Feb  4 01:32 fw
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   65032 Feb  4 01:32 fwupx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root     121 Feb  4 01:32 grub.cfg
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1111928 Feb  4 01:32 grubx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1168464 Feb  4 01:32 mmx64.efi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1169992 Feb  4 01:32 shimx64.efi
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft# cd Boot
root@ubuntu-mate:/mnt/sda1/EFI/Microsoft/Boot# cp shimx64.efi bootmgfw.efi

Steps were based on this: https://web.archive.org/web/20161105112 ... io-pro-13/

But I also found these informative:
https://old.nixaid.com/linux-mint-17-do ... o-13-uefi/
http://lightofdawn.org/wiki/wiki.cgi/-w ... uxUefiBoot

[Brian Quinlan]

Ah, I've just stumbled across another post from you with the same subject where you do provide more detail:

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=262260

It's not the same problem as I've described, but it's probably worth leaving my earlier reply in case it's useful to someone else.