I have heard so much about UEFI, and I wasn't sure about trying Ubuntu but I found it was easy to boot from a USB just to check to see if Ubuntu would see all my hardware. (I wanted to make sure my wifi would work).
I found that hitting the F2 key at boot up to get into the BIOS did not work. But I also found that there is a way. While in Windows 8 at the desktop pull the menu open on the right side of the screen. Select "Setting". On the bottom of the setting menu there is a hot link "Change PC Setting." This will open this window: Screenshot (3).jpg
Go to "General" on the left and scroll down to the bottom and chose " Advance Startup "Restart Now". Then you can select to start from a USB.
When I did this it booted into the live OS on the USB stick.
Now I am on the road and not at home so I didn't want to install on my hard drive because my Internet is very slow. But I did try to install on a external SSD I had with me, but I had some issues. Because of the slow Internet It had trouble loading software. I will wait until I get home then try again. I may just install the SSD drive internally and then do a fresh install. Since doing the above I can now get into the BIOS using the F2 key to change the setting to boot into Ubuntu.
Before doing this I plan on backing up my Windows 8 Recovery partition using a program called "ASIS Backtracker" It was a free download.
When I get home I will be adding to the thread.
I found that hitting the F2 key at boot up to get into the BIOS did not work. But I also found that there is a way. While in Windows 8 at the desktop pull the menu open on the right side of the screen. Select "Setting". On the bottom of the setting menu there is a hot link "Change PC Setting." This will open this window: Screenshot (3).jpg
Go to "General" on the left and scroll down to the bottom and chose " Advance Startup "Restart Now". Then you can select to start from a USB.
When I did this it booted into the live OS on the USB stick.
Now I am on the road and not at home so I didn't want to install on my hard drive because my Internet is very slow. But I did try to install on a external SSD I had with me, but I had some issues. Because of the slow Internet It had trouble loading software. I will wait until I get home then try again. I may just install the SSD drive internally and then do a fresh install. Since doing the above I can now get into the BIOS using the F2 key to change the setting to boot into Ubuntu.
Before doing this I plan on backing up my Windows 8 Recovery partition using a program called "ASIS Backtracker" It was a free download.
When I get home I will be adding to the thread.