I'm confused by the installation process with UEFI. I've tried and failed to install several times, even by deleting all partitions and formatting the internal drive, etc. but I've never been able to get it to boot. I have a Dell XPS 15 L521X and I am planning to remove the CD and add an additional SSD to boot Ubuntu separately. Any advice would be appreciated.
Are you sure you're booting the livecd in UEFI mode? Grub and lilo can't automatically create a UEFI bootable partition if the system has been booted from MBR.
Boooted that way from the UEFI boot options at startup, as far as I can tell. I created the USB with unetbootin. Did I need to do something else?
UEFI doesn't need unetbootin to boot, just the contents of the livecd iso on a fat32 partition. UEFI looks for a /EFI/boot folder with a bootx64.efi in it to boot, which the ubuntu image has. Make sure when the boot list comes up you choose the "UEFI: (thumbdrive)" option.
Crap. I didn't know that. Thanks. When I install the second HD, I'll give it another go. So, as I understand, I can just manually copy the contents of the Ubuntu iso to the USB that I have formatted to FAT32 and I should be able to boot from it via UEFI in the boot options?
Do I need to do special prep to the second hard drive in terms of partitions or can I start with an unallocated drive and let Ubuntu's installer format it, since I am going to be dual booting via the two separate drives?