Slowly getting together a working EFI booting dual boot system.
For anybody who is interested. The EFI specification can be verified by loading an Ubuntu installer and at grub options screen when booted EFI mode use the
lsefisystab
command to confirm vendor and EFI version. On this motherboard doing this confirms Tianocore and EFI 1.1 as EFI type and version. Which is also confirmed at the rodsbooks page specific to Gigabytes Hybrid-EFI.
As mentioned earlier due to losing a partition which left my Windows unusable i reinstalled in BIOS mode to get working system again. Have just completed a non-destructive conversion from MBR to GPT successfuly which means now have an EFI windows install again. The guide i followed in achieving this uses GPTGen and instruction on "How to" are found at this
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14286.converting-windows-bios-installation-to-uefi.aspx tutorial. Backing up the boot files should allow fairly easy reinstatement after firmware decides to reset again... or if i mount gpt drive using tools that can not handle gpt...
It is looking like i may have to do a BIOS install of Ubuntu before converting to UEFI for a fully EFI booting dual boot system as after trying latest releases of other distros as well as trying newer and older flavours of Ubuntu still can not get an EFI install happening on this hardware for a linux EFI install. So maybe some of the comments here may be of some use :¬p
The UEFI specs webpage and the rodsbooks webpages confirm EFI shell and EFI GUI are not part of the UEFI specification but is easy enough to add the shell of your choosing in order to help manage the EFI system.