I am working on the installation for Mint 17 and need to understand what is going on with my Windows 8.1 booting. Here is an image showing all partitions from Windows:

As you can see the EFI patition is 100% free space, and "Boot" is included in the status message for the C partition.

In these instructions the author suggests changing the "efi" parition to EFI Boot partition using the "Change" option. However, I do not have an "efi" partition in under my available partitions in the Mint installation.

If I create root, home, and swap partitions, and click "Install Now" I get the following error:

The partition table format in use on your disks normally requires you to create a separate partition for boot loader code. This partition should be marked for use as a "Reserved BIOS boot area" and should be at least 1MB in size.

UPDATE >> It looks like I do have an EFI system partition, but Mint isn't recognizing it as such, and is not providing the option to "Change" to "EFI Boot partition" selected.

mint@mint ~ $ sudo parted -l Model: ATA TOSHIBA THNSNS25 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 256GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: gpt Number Start End Size File system Name Flags 1 1049kB 316MB 315MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag 2 316MB 588MB 273MB fat32 EFI system partition boot 3 588MB 722MB 134MB Microsoft reserved partition msftres 4 722MB 123GB 123GB ntfs Basic data partition msftdata 5 245GB 246GB 472MB ntfs hidden, diag 6 246GB 254GB 8389MB ntfs Basic data partition hidden, diag 7 254GB 256GB 2147MB Basic data partition hidden

How should I proceed?