I have a Lenovo G580(20157) laptop that didn't come with any preinstalled OS. I used win 7 until now and gradually upgraded to windows 8 and then to win 10. I also updated my bios drivers. My bios is phoenix secure.

I then wanted to install Ubuntu to replace Windows because I am just sick of it. This is when I encountered the UEFI issue.

I couldn't boot to livecd (either on a bootable disc or bootable USB). 

Then I switched off Secure boot. And yet it couldn't boot into live cd (Windows bootable disks work). I even tried removing the hard disk to see whether I could access the boot menu, but no such luck.

The crux of the matter is that I can only get to the boot menu on pressing F12 just before booting. I can't see the UEFI settings in that menu. I heard that F2 should open any such menu, but after hundreds of tries, I couldn't get it.

Now I feel that the EFI partition is the culprit and so wish to delete it and then boot via livecd and then install ubuntu. I have backed up my data , just in case. But I am hesitant about this. 

Will deleting the EFI partition help me boot into livecd? Please help me. Please excuse my abrupt and confused problem description without any images. Will post more information if required?

EDIT: I forgot to mention that my laptop is 64-bit and that I was trying to install a 32-bit version