the linux distributions based on older distributions are mostly based on MBR partitioning scheme. These distributions are not detected by UEFI BIOS.
To install linux in laptops having UEFI BIOS, the following steps can be followed:-
Preparing The boot pen drive
1. download Rufus. Rufus is a small utility about 1.5 MB in size which can make flash drives/pen drive bootable. Rufus can make both MBR type which is used by older conventional BIOS and GPT type which is used by newer UEFI bios when reading the partition tables of the inserted pen drive. both MBR & GPT is available as dropdown in Rufus, However, whether UEFI is supported depends on the ISO of the OS which is downloaded. In case the ISO does not support UEFI, the GPT option won't be available in drop down.
2. The UEFI bios first reads the EFI partition on the GPT partitioned pen drive to boot the OS. The EFI partition is FAT 32 partition usually about 500 MB for Linux systems where the bootloader is stored. The bootloader in case of MBR based system is GRUB.
3. The UEFI BIOS does have support for legacy MBR based pen drives . but that is only for loading live OS from pen drive . For installing the OS in the internal hard drive, only EFI based boot is usually possible in such systems.
4. pressing F2 to go into bios, the EFI file of the inserted pen drive is visible as EFI entry . If there are no EFI bootloaders present in the pen drive, this field will be blank denoting that the pen drive can't boot the system.
5. The advantage of GPT partitioning is support of drives more than 2 TB, which is the upper limit for MBR type of partitioning.
INSTALLING LINUX ON HARD DRIVE
After trying the distro as live USB drive, if you decided to install , there should be a install app in the desktop itself, launching the app and follow these steps for completion and install of OS in hard drive. The following points may be noted for partitioning of drive using utility like GPARTED:-
1. mark 500 MB as FAT32 and label the partition as /efi/ boot. This is where the bootloader for EFI will be installed ( which would be visible to BIOS as stated earlier)
2. mark a space equal to that of RAM in the laptop ( 8 GB or 16 GB) as Swap space.
3. remaining space can be marked as / (root) partition
Now, you can install and follow the other steps for completion.
