Dual booting windows 8 and Ubuntu 12.04 on UEFI system

[Cromulent]

Up until now I have been an Arch Linux user but have become frustrated with the amount of things that break overtime. I'd like to switch to Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my development computer. I have one hard drive dedicated to Linux and one hard drive for Windows 8. If I just go ahead and install Xubuntu will it automatically pick up with the Windows 8 install on a different disk and configure itself or do I need manually make any adjustments? I'd rather not have to reinstall Windows if I can help it at all. This is on a UEFI based computer by the way.

 

[panyan]

I tried this a couple of months ago. After days of reinstalling ubuntu in every different combination - i gave up.

the uefi wouldnt let me boot into ubuntu even if it installed correctly

 

[mortals]

I have Windows 7 UEFI + Archlinux UEFI on my system with grub (both on the same hdd)

Not sure how much different windows 8 is but it was pretty easy.
The hardest part was getting grub recognized by the mobo, was ok once I got UEFI shell.

Here is my grub.cfg entry for windows 7 UEFI:

if [ "${grub_platform}" == "efi" ]; then

    # Windows x86_64 UEFI
    # Will work only in grub(2) uefi x86_64
    menuentry "Microsoft Windows x86_64 UEFI-GPT" {
        insmod part_gpt
        insmod fat
        insmod search_fs_uuid
        insmod chain
        search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,gpt1 --hint-efi=hd0,gpt1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt1  3CE6-DD71
        chainloader /efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
    }

fi

 

[uncle_rufus]

I had a lot of fun with this trying to get Mint + Windows 7 dual-booting alongside each other some months back (UEFI also)

Having read many instructions such as the one posted by mortals above I just couldn't get a working solution with grub, and seemed to vary between a system which would ignore grub completely and always boot straight into windows, or boot into grub but never have the option of launching windows...

In the end I installed the rEFIned boot manager and it works absolutely perfectly, as well as looking quite a lot nicer than grub out of the box

 

[teppic]

Refind is easiest, yeah. It automatically finds Windows and as many Linux installations as you have without the need to install any individual bootloaders. It can also boot a Linux kernel directly (UEFI firmware is able to launch the kernel without a bootloader).

(And I much prefer the cleaner method of booting purely in 64bit mode instead of ancient 8086)