My friend got a brand new HP quad core machine with 8 GB of Ram and asked if I
could install Kubuntu on it. "no problem" I confidently replied -
overconfidently, as it turned out.
I didn't know that BIOS's were already shipping with the dreaded UEFI BIOS but
she's got it and it wouldn't even show the first screen from the install disk. I
looked through the BIOS settings and disabled everything that looked like it was
security related. Apparently that disabled it as the install then went smoothly.
One small problem on rebooting: no Grub start menu. It just booted straight into
Win 7.
I put in my Grub Repair disk and it solved the problem, although not as neatly
as usual. It asked me to copy and paste about 4 lines of code into a terminal
window. It said it couldn't install the boot loader in the usual place (MBR) and
recommended it be put on each drive (or partition? Only one 1 TB drive here). I
blindly followed the advice and now on the Grub start menu there are 2 entries
to start Windows, sda1 and sda2. Both work, as does Kubuntu, so I'm not
complaining.
Problem solved and it was a great learning experience. I wish I knew exactly
which BIOS setting disabled the UEFI boot, and whether there was a way to
install a working Grub within Kubuntu. I used the 64 bit Alternate Installer.
So it seems, at this point in time, the HP UEFI BIOS's can still be reconfigured
to permit a Linux install. I'll be very interested to hear the experiences of
others.