I was finally (after 3 weeks of work and 3 'factory restore' operations of Windows 7) able to run Ubuntu

12.04 on my HP Envy-4 ultrabook... just without Windows 7.

'yannubuntu' encouraged me and asked me to try 4 steps to help diagnose the problem. These,
inadvertently, led me to a solution that got me (pretty much no dual boot) where I wanted to go.

Step 1)
Disconnect all disks.

This was problematic, the Envy-4 doesn't even have a removable battery or removable cover for access
to the hardware:

I decided I would have to work on that idea later.

Step 2)
Via gparted reduce sda1 from 496 Gb to 50 Gb.

This was to insure the installer could access the entire range of the partition.

I performed this operation first:

At this point I realized that I might be able to disconnect sdb (iternal 32 Gb solid state drive) if I used
gparted to delete partitions and leave that disk unallocated. So I did:

Step 3)
Reboot.

This was to test if shrinking sda and removing sdb would let the system boot correctly.

This is also when things got interesting ;-)

The BIOS, developed by Insyde, ver F.0B which uses modern UEFI technology boot firmware,
detected that there was no RAID volume defined (and apparently there was supposed to be one). The
BIOS presented me with a completely new screen (instead of the limited choice of boot order):

This indicated that sda, the hard drive, was Disabled, and sdb, the solid state drive, was not (any
longer) set up as RAID.

I removed disk acceleration (main menu #5):

There was a confirmation message for ending acceleration but since there was no data of interest at
this point I confirmed y:

Once this was done I found that the disks were both, now, non-RAID:

This looked very promising.

I booted into my live Ubuntu again (USB stick using unetbootin) and ran gparted to set up the
partitions I wanted for my working Ubuntu ultrabook and installed Ubuntu 12.04.1 into them:

I found out that this WOULD NOT BOOT, still. The problem is that I installed Ubuntu on sdb, but the
BIOS looks for the boot information on the FIRST disk (sda). The next challenge.
Step 3)
Run boot-repair.:

The BIOS from Insyde doesn't give me the option of booting from any other than the first disk,
however grub on the first disk offers the option to boot from sdb now.

At this point I had a working Ubuntu installation, running the system from the solid-state memory on
sdb and using the hard disk for swap area, other Linux systems and a large /home partition !!

------------------

Now I have to figure out how to get Beats Audio to play, since Ubuntu doesn't seem to have a default
driver for it that works.

But that is what keeps it interesting, running a great system on hardware that manufacturers don't have
any (significant) interest in having work with Linux. ;-)

James Luscher
2012-09-10