[SOLVED] Fedora 17 UEFI installation fail - help?

[Last Chaos 7]

1. Copy the contents of /dev/sda6 or /dev/sda7 to /dev/sda1.
2. Delete /dev/sda6 and /dev/sda7 (your spare ESPs). Use gdisk, GParted, or parted for this; do not attempt to use fdisk on this disk!
3. Delete /dev/sda8 (your BIOS Boot Partition).
4. At a Linux root shell prompt, type "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=440 count=1". Be sure to type that correctly, including the numbers! This will erase the GRUB code in the MBR, thus reducing any temptation the firmware might have to try a BIOS boot of the disk.
5. Mount /dev/sda1 (the ESP) and change to its root.
6. Rename efi/Boot to efi/Boot-backup on the ESP.
7. Rename efi/refind to efi/Boot on the ESP.
8. Rename efi/Boot/refind_x64.efi to efi/Boot/bootx64.efi on the ESP. This and the previous couple of steps will make rEFInd the default EFI boot program.
9. Reboot with no CD inserted or USB disk attached.

Okay I'm now at step 5. Should I mount /dev/sda1 to "/mnt/esp" like before when I was copying /dev/sda6 to /dev/sda1? And how do I do the renaming?

[srs5694]

You can mount the partition anywhere you like for that maintenance; or you can skip it and use your firmware to create an NVRAM entry for rEFInd, as noted in post #15 to this thread.

In a Linux shell, renaming is done with the "mv" command, as in "mv foo.txt bar.txt" to rename foo.txt to bar.txt.

[Last Chaos 7]

Nothing changed, it told me there was no boot device and to insert one into the selected boot device and press a key. The firmware options changed in that the UEFI disk drive thing didn't exist and I did not have the option to add a new boot option.

I'm running a memory test to see if anything comes up

Also, could I just remove what I tried to install of fedora? would that fix it? and if so how do I do that?

[srs5694]

Unless you're doing things with your firmware options that you've not described, the inconsistency of the appearance/non-appearance of the option to add boot options is troubling. This sounds more like a hard disk issue, though, almost as if your hard disk connector were flaky. If that were the case, though, I'd expect there to have been major problems when transferring files during Fedora installation.

You could try booting with the rEFInd boot CD (see here for a download link) and see if that produces anything. Also, most computers have some way to reach a boot device menu, typically by pressing F2, F10, or F12 during the boot process (but details are annoyingly inconsistent). See if you can get such a menu, particularly if the rEFInd CD doesn't boot for you -- you might need to play with the options to boot the CD in EFI mode vs. BIOS mode.

[Last Chaos 7]

My computer is fixed!! I brought it to my next door neighbor who is a computer guy and we worked on it a little and he finished it the next morning. From what I understand... He figured out that the preloaded windows on my laptop was windows 7 home premium. Then he downloaded a windows 7 home premium recovery disk. He downloaded Gparted and used it to turn off all flags except the boot flag on the windows partition. Then he used the recovery disk to fix it. I know there were other things that he did with code and what not but he doesn't know what exactly fixed it, as he was trying many different things. If he gives me more info on it I'll post it here.

Thanks everyone who helped!