Installing Ubuntu on Toshiba Satellite with Windows 8

Question

All I want to do is install Linux Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as another OS on my laptop (which already has Windows 8). I realize this thread might be deemed as a duplicate of this but I don't care about back-up or Lubuntu, nor can I disable UEFI because I can't get into BIOS no matter how hard I try.

I found out about this option in Windows 8, which for some reason has something to do with recovery: "Change advanced start-up settings"/"Advanced startup". Seems like at this point I do not have to deal with BIOS, UEFI, and Secure Boot, nor do I want to; this installation process is already complicated enough. (I'm writing this because I don't know if this is relevant to the problem I'm about to address.) I boot from the DVD with Ubuntu .iso image properly burnt on it. At the start-up I saw a suspicious line:

Could not open "\EFI\BOOT\fallback.efi": 14

Then it moves on to the boot partitions menu without Windows 8 on it. Now I'm booting into the trial mode of Ubuntu. Even during the installation process it does not recognize Windows 8:

On this blog the author says that she "had to manually partition the hard drive, because the Ubuntu installer didn't recognize that Windows 8 was already on the computer." I don't know if this is safe for an amateur like myself to carry it out, considering that partitioning cannot be undone and I don't know how to do it right:

Problem/question: How do I get it to recognize Windows 8 so that I can partition the memory correctly?

Hope I didn't put up too many findings. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I also have Toshiba. It's annoying that they lock almost all the things in there BIOS. But you can just create a partition with your windows OS. Later come back to ubuntu installation and use this partition for installing ubuntu (Don't forget to partition this partition into two. 2GB for swap (u can assign more if you want)and rest as ext4 or ext3 whatever you like). This should solve your problem.