bind-home.conf not binding to /home on LL2.4/win8.1 UEFI dual boot set-up

[gold_finger]

Goldfinger, you wrote to add the following 2 lines to fstab file...

# EFI System Partition
UUID=6E57-A726  /boot/efi  vfat  defaults  0  1

I regret to say, goldfinger, that this didn't work...

I'm stumped!  But doesn't matter now because you re-installed everything from scratch.

On sdb, where I have tried to set up a shared DATA partition (that we are having difficulty in binding), it was formatted as ntfs on a GPT drive. I formatted in ntfs so that I could share data between both win8.1 and LL. 

It has just occurred to me that as sdb  carries the flag 'msftdata', as a microsoft basic data partition, it might be protected by windows from being shared or bound to My Home Directory in LL..?  What do you think?

I kind of doubt that the "msftdata" flag is causing any problems and doubt that the NTFS formatting is the problem either.

I suppose you could change the formatting to FAT32 instead.  As long as none of the files you want to save there are bigger than 4GB, FAT32 will work and it's natively supported by Windows.  Or you could try the things N4RPS pointed to and format it as Ext3, or Ext4.  Personally, I don't think that's the issue and if I were you I'd wait to get booting sorted out first -- then try symlinks to the DATA partition instead of binding to it.  If symlinks work, just use those.  Follow instructions to create those in the tutorial you used originally.

It's worth noting that rebooting LL after a fresh install for a dual boot UEFI system also got stuck and hung indefinitely, when I ran the install so that /home and swap would go on on sdb (/ being on sda).  In the end, the only UEFI win8.1/LL set up so far that has appeared to work for me is one where I exclude sdb, and have the two OSes with LL's home installed as root, all on sda. So could the msftdata flag be interfering???

Again, I doubt it's the "msftdata" flag.  Something else is causing the problem.  A while back, forum member sysdrum reported on this having problems with installs whenever he put the Root and Home partitions on separate HDD's.  I've been meaning to test that out to see for  myself, but just haven't gotten around to it.  However, I don't doubt him -- he's not new to Linux -- I just am not sure if that is a blanket problem or one specific to certain machines/components.

With the above in mind and assuming that you followed the steps to complete the UEFI conversion just as you did before, but with no booting success -- can you do another LL install and put Root and Home on sda, leaving sdb for DATA and Swap?  That should work if you're a victim of same problem sysdrum encountered.  (Assuming that most of your data files end up on DATA partition, your Home partition can be fairly small -- 3-5GB should be more than enough.)


EDIT ADDED LATER:

From this post of yours, you said:

In the good fully functioning copy that I have of the UEFI dual boot (fast boot & secure boot enabled), that I didn't attempt to install binding on, it works amazingly: the grub screen comes up almost immediately and both LL and win8.1 load from the grub menu in less than 6 seconds!  It's the binding problem that's driving me absolutely crazy...  I am still going to work on this but await further feedback from you on next steps...  I wondered if you could reply on that thread for the binding, so that everything is kept together in one place.

Can you put that good copy back in the computer and run a quick test?

Assuming you have a DATA partition that you just did not setup for binding, can you at least choose it from file manager in LL, mount it and explore the contents on the partition?  If nothing on it, create a few test folders/files on it from within Windows, then see if you can read them in LL after mounting the partition?  Report back results.

Also, when booted into LL on good copy, can you post the output of these 4 terminal commands back here for us to see:

Code:

lsblk
sudo blkid -c /dev/null
cat /etc/fstab
[ -d /sys/firmware/efi ] && echo "EFI boot on HDD" || echo "Legacy boot on HDD"