Saturday 21 June 2014

How to Dual-Booting With Windows 8 And Linux

Here are six ways to set up multi-booting with Windows 8 and Linux:

1. Install the Linux GRUB bootloader
-Install the Linux GRUB bootloader as the default boot object.

-The catch here is you need to have a UEFI-compatible Linux distribution (openSuSE, Fedora, Linux Mint and Ubuntu).

-When you install a UEFI-compatible Linux distribution and everything works well, you will get the GRUB boot menu after a reboot. You can then choose either Linux or Windows 8 to boot from it. 

2. Use the BIOS Boot Select Key
-There's a possibility that doing everything of the above still gets you nowhere, and you're still getting Windows rather than Linux after reboot.

-In that case you can use the BIOS Boot Selection option (activated by pressing a special key that varies between systems during the power-on or reboot process.) 

-Pressing the special key will interrupt the Windows boot process and you will get a list of available operating systems (Windows 8 and Linux).

3. Enable 'Legacy Boot'
-Some systems make it difficult to enable Legacy Boot. The option might be well hidden in the BIOS configuration, or require a BIOS password before they will let you change it. 

-Legacy Boot allows you to install more or less any Linux distribution, without worrying about UEFI compatbility.

4. Try a workaround
-There is a "next boot" option available, which specifices a one time boot configuration. 

-If it is set the system will try to boot that item first, and will also clear that setting so that on the next boot it goes back to using the default boot sequence list. 

-The next boot configuration can be set from Linux using efibootmgr -n XXXX, where XXXX is the item number from the boot list.

-Add the efibootmgr command to the Linux startup scripts. Every time you boot Linux, it would reset the value so that it would boot Linux again the following time.

5. Trick the default boot process
-Put the Linux shim.efi (or grubx64.efi) image where the Windows Boot Manager is normally located. This is a cleaver trick to trick the default boot process. 

6. Install a different Boot Manager 
-rEFInd has the advantage of being able to boot almost anything - Windows, Linux, MacOS. It automatically finds whatever might be on the disk and then presents you with a boot selection list. 

Source: ZDNet

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