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Dual booting on Lenovo X270 with Windows 11 which has taken 3 primary partitions but is missing the efi boot partition

cn flag

I am trying to set up dual booting on Lenovo X270 with Windows 11. I previously have installed 22.04 on this X270 machine.I have 22.04 on the USB stick. This F12s perfectly on the target machine.

I go to install, and it gets as Far as selecting the partition, then I get the error message that an efi boot partition is required. True.

W11 has taken 3 primary partitions but is missing the efi .boot partition. The disk has four primary partitions- A small W11 partition, the big W11 partition that I have resized to give space to create the Ubuntu partition, and the W11 recovery partition. Youtubers say dont mess with 3 W11 partitions- I need a fourth partition for efi.boot partition and that must be a primary - and in addition I need a partition for Ubuntu which could be a logical placed in an extended partition. 3+1 +1more exceeds 4.

The version of W11 supplied to Lenovo appears to hide the crucial files in the small systems partition in hard code so is not recognised by Ubuntu.

Question: what is the way forward?

PonJar avatar
in flag
A limit of 4 partitions only applies to MBR partitioning. I'd check to see if you have MBR or GPT partitioning. Also is your firmware set to Legacy or UEFI mode? Ubuntu can install either way. How did W11 get on to this machine? Has it been upgraded from an original W10 install?
clem avatar
cn flag
The machine was bought with W11 installed. I assume from error messages that it is a four partition MBR. UEFI Bios R0iet46w (1.24)- Boot NetworkBoot USB HDD UEFI Legacy Boot [Both] [Legacy first] CSM Support [Yes]-- Mode [Quick} List F12 [Enabled] Order Lock [Disabled] - Hey thanks for looking
PonJar avatar
in flag
Never assume anything with computers ;) It will come back and bite you! To determine MBR or GPT, open disk management in Windows, right click the disk and select properties. It should then be obvious. If it’s MBR, you don’t need an EFI partition. You should answer questions in comments by adding the information to the question. It’s not clear in comments what your Bios/UEFI settings are. It appears you can boot either legacy or UEFI. I’d guess your disk is MBR and you have booted the installer in UEFI. That will not work. If your disk is MBR set the Bios to legacy only and try again.
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