G7

To install Ubuntu...

Had to set the bios to the standard plus one. Get a Ubuntu USB installer plugged in and get in to bios.

Make sure safe boot is off as well as tpm. Bios check I set to audit mode. We need to have legacy roms and enabled boot to legacy... Enabled or checked. Last normal bios setting is to make sure that raid is off and ahci is on.

With an ubuntu usb plugged in, make a new boot entry in the boot settings. Call it UbuntuUSBInstall or what you want and in file field aim to the /efi/boot/grubx64.efi file. Save and let it boot to usb via efi. Just to be sure hit f12 as it's booting and look for UbuntuUSBInstall or what you named the boot entry.

You should see what looks like and old grub prompt with three lines. Leave selected the line for try Ubuntu. Hit E for edit boot line. Find kernel line (starts with linux) in grub entry and add "nomodeset" without quotes. I added just before quiet. Hit f10 to boot.

Once in Ubuntu live open a terminal and cd in to /sys/firmware/efi/efivars and see if you have any efivars files. If you do then Ubuntu "probably" booted properly and sees the system as efi based. All my past attempts failed as it prob hit the wrong boot file and defaulted to legacy boot from installer USB. I say probably on seeing efivars files as this is not a guaranteed method. Please Consult Ubuntu forums for checking if efi boot took place.

I was going to try to dual boot to test but installer wanted 5400 rpm drive and would not let me select ssd. That being said the ssd was available for taking the whole disk so that is what I did. I just completed the installation taking the whole disk and on reboot I went in to look at boot entries. It set itself up well. The shimx64.efi file that ubuntu uses was in as the only available boot option as internal.

So in summary by setting bios as we should and adding a boot entry aiming at grubx64 I was able to boot the system to the Ubuntu 18.04.1 installer in a way that let it see my G7 as efi based and the installer worked wonderfully.

Before doing this I highly recommend installing virtualbox on windows and taking a vdi image of your ssd. Google around for taking physical to vdi on virtualbox. I don't have the tutorial handy but I remember changing directory in to c:\programfiles\virtualbox and using a command prompt to issue an internal command that called \physicaldisk\0 and in order for it to work right I had to change the 0 to a 1 so it imaged the second hard disk and not the first. If you get that far you WI need to have a windows 10 install iso handy. Add this iso as another hard disk on your virtual machine settings and set your vdi of your ssd as the second drive in order. As windows is booting to the installer press f6 and get in to a prompt or command terminal through safe mode. Going from memory but we need to fix the mbr... Select repair my computer and repair boot. Manual method from terminal would be bootrec.exe /fixmbr. Def double check me on this. Idea being is that we just moved the operating system off of physical metal and it probably won't boot until we fix the boot record from within virtualbox. This allows us to keep windows as a file on the 1tb drive (if wanted) and run it inside a virtual machine. We paid for it! Might as well keep it. We can later change a vdi to a vhd and restore windows if needed. Finding a tutorial on this may be key as there are more settings that I am failing to recall that one needs to set in the machine settings to get windows to boot.

That should let your windows ten boot properly in a virtual environment. Now on to Nvidia, setting up prime for on the fly gpu switching and adjusting fstab to include the 1tb drive and of course game installation. Please let me know if I **bleep** anything up in this post and I'll fix. If anyone needs help doing the rest let me know and I'll hop on a pc and do a better job formatting the steps.