Brand new Asus U500VZ, Windows 8 preinstalled. I removed the fakeraid, turned fastboot and secure boot off, and set the SATA to AHCI and deleted all existing partitions on both SSDs.
Purchased Windows 8 Pro, installed on first disk, everything worked fine, Win 8 created four partitions: ntfs recovery, fat32 efi, some odd Microsoft reserved partition, and a main ntfs for the OS.
Booted to Ubuntu 12.10 live USB, it didn't detect Windows 8. I choose to install with manual partitions - the installer selected /dev/sda2 (which is the fat32 efi partition Windows 8 had created) to use as efi. Created partitions on the second disk for / (/dev/sdb1) swap (/dev/sdb5 and /home (dev/sdb6). I choose /dev/sda2 as the location to install the bootloader, as in UEFI Windows 8 and Ubuntu should be able to share the EFI partition.
On reboot, ubuntu loads up automatically. So I ran backup-repair, which gave me this. Gave me Grub on reboot, the two Windows 8 entries gave errors basically saying that the device couldn't be found, and then the /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/xxx.efi couldn't be found. I tried again and got this paste.ubuntu.com/1572985/ and then this paste.ubuntu.com/1572995/.
Through the BIOS I can see Windows Boot Manager and two Ubuntu entries. If I select the Windows Boot Manager the screen flickers off and then returns with Grub. I managed to (I think) fix the grub entries following the info here. And now I have a grub entry that will also flicker the screen and then return to Grub.
I have tried the Windows 8 repair installation, and it just leaves me with the ability to boot into a Windows 8 "Preparing to repair" or similar screen.
I am completely stuck. Any advice please?! Have I installed Windows 8 in legacy BIOS mode somehow? This seems unlikely because my BIOS doesn't even seem to have an option for that (in the boot priority list there are no options for simple booting from a hard drive, and when a bootable USB is in it is listed as a single UEFI:xxxxx option.
EDIT
I just tried top answer here. Now when I select either my new Windows 8 grub entry (which looks like:
insmod part_gpt
insmod fat
insmod search_fs_uuid
insmod chain
search --fs-uuid --no-floppy --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,gpt1 --hint-efi=hd0,gpt1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,gpt1 1ce5-7f28
chainloader /efi/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
Or I choose Windows Boot Manager from the BIOS I get the Windows Recovery "Your PC couldn't start properly" screen. Error code: 0xc0000001
EDIT: New question on superuser.com relating to my utter failure to solve this problem: https://superuser.com/questions/543369/can-uefi-settings-brick-new-laptops
