Installing Ubuntu 13.10 on an Asus Zenbook UX301

If you have an Ubuntu installation CD made from an ISO you downloaded from Ubuntu.com, you'll notice quickly that your slim, shimmering, featherweight personal computer has no DVD drive. While this might be the only time you'll want to use the DVD drive, this is a time you want to use the DVD drive. But never fear! There are other ways. Mostly, that means following these directions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

The Internet said that F2 or Escape will get to the boot screen while loading. Escape works.

Second time (battery was a lemon and was handed a brand new machine by Cambridge MicroCenter) i didn't have these problems...

h2. Notes from the first time

It stayed on the "ubuntu . . . . ." screen for a very long time. (I hit the spacebar once, but i don't think that did anything one way or another.) It eventually came up with a light grey screen, and a darker grey bar across the top. Then the purple screen came. The system notifications are tiny. Minutes later, the Ubuntu startup sound. And finally... the welcome screen.

"Executing 'grub-install /dev/sda' failed. This is a fatal error." Subsequent attempts ("Sorry, an error occurred and it was not possible to install the bootloader at the specified location." ... "Choose a different device to install the bootloader on:" add to the grub-install error "(hd0)".

Skipping to step 9 of this post on running Ubuntu and Windows 8 side by side, ran boot-repair from the live CD.

After boot-repair installed itself and set itslef up, and all its dependencies, it ran and gave the least helpful pop-up ever: "EFI detected. Please check the options."

But just accepting the default options looked good... and then led to:

"dpkg-error detected. Please open a terminal then" sudo chroot "/mnt/boot-sav/mapper/isw_ecighjaajj_ASUS_OS5" dpkg --configure -a "Then close this window."

Note that this means opening a new terminal, which you can do by right-clicking on the terminal icon in the dock. You'll get

Hit Apply again. Again got message "The boot of your PC is in Legacy mode. You may want to retry after changing it to EFI mode. Do you want to continue?" Yes.

I had to paste the set of five commands boot-repair gave me twice for it to run everything. Just ran the first two the first time.

Declined the option to backup and rename Win-EFI on the first go-round.

"Boot successfully repaired." And gave me the URL: http://paste.ubuntu.com/6869501/

"Please do not forget to make your BIOS boot on mapper/isw_ecighjaajj_ASUS_OS1/EFI/ubuntu/shimx64.efi file!"

Hmm. I thought i told it in the first place, and saw it using here, OS5.

"You may want to retry after activating the [Backup and rename Windows EFI files] option.

The boot of your PC is in Legacy mode. You may want to retry after changing it to EFI mode."

Yeesh. What when why where how?

Reinstalled Ubuntu from the USB boot as others have mentioned, and now it works!

Still need to hold down escape to avoid the Windows boot.

And Ubuntu is listed twice on the boot load screen i get by holding down escape (with various Ubuntu and Windows options), i'm using the second one for now, and it works.

Reference

http://askubuntu.com/questions/80455/no-root-file-system-defined-error-while-installing-ubuntu

http://askubuntu.com/questions/329801/no-root-file-system-is-defined (at least the answer mentioned ext4 for what formatting to do... seemed Asus had parts of the drive set aside for Linux, but needed to reformat like this)

"reinstalled ubuntu on top of the malfunctioning original install, without making any changes to partitions. Worked a treat - will boot up into either W Vista or ubuntu. Many thanks for your help!"
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2030255
Believe!