I recently bought a new desktop machine that came with windows 10 preinstalled. I had asked the company doing to the build to create a 500gb partition for windows on one of the two hard drives for this build. This would leave a significant amount of space on both drives to allow some cross disk partitioning for Linux and other uses. Its been a while since I had to select a distro, and ended up picking Mint Linux.
Starting up the install process was fine with the bootable CD. I partitioned swap and /tmp in two partitions on Drive#1 (same disk as windows) and another for / on drive #2. All was fine until the bootloader was going to write and grub-installed failed. I tried selecting a few other locations for where to put the loader, but it either didn't like those either, or the install process hung at some point.
I double checked the bios to ensure fast boot and secure boot were off (both were from the start). Devices were set to UEFI boot mode in the bios as well. After some further checking, I found the windows partitions were built in mbr/bios boot mode and that was screwing up grub. I did the quick google search and found this article to be pretty straight forward for conversion to uefi.
I went back to windows, booted into recovery and tried the steps, but the validate came back with an error for the disk. Looking around some more it seemed like the linux partitions that were created during the mint installation attempt may be the problem. So I booted back into the live mint/install state and used the partition tools to wipe out all the linux partitions. Booted back into windows, then recovery, tried steps again and everything worked fine this time.
One more reboot, back to mint installer, set up the partitions again and everything was smooth and successful.
