Fun evening installing Arch Linux on an old laptop.

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That is all. Back to hacking. Wish me luck with drivers.

No, not that old, but it's early enough I can avoid UEFI.

My eagerness to move forward is held back by a long operation writing entropy onto a future LUKS partition, but I can wait another hour...

Can anyone help me with a query related to this thread?

A couple of months ago I tried to create a Windows/Linux dual boot setup on a HP laptop, which has Widows 8.1 as its installed OS. It also has the UEFI firmware.

I created a partition on the hard drive, then apparently successfully installed on it a version of Linux Mageia from a live disk. However, the laptop simply didn't seem to recognise the existence of the Linux partition, and it would only boot into Windows from the hard drive (no sign of a dual boot screen). The only way I can experience Linux on this computer is now by booting directly from the live disk.

Is it simply the case that machines with UEFI are designed to block the use of any OS except Windows, or is there a way round this?

Hello. To answer the above question I must ask another. Was windows installed first? To boot an OS there must be a bootloader program at the begining of the disk (the Master Boot Record, or MBR). Windows uses it's own proprietary bootloader that is hard coded to boot into windows. It will ignore all other partitions.

To circumvent this you would have to install and use an open source bootloader like GRUB2 (grub for short) to the MBR of your disk. Grub will overwrite the windows bootloader and should give you a choice between linux and windows. I also believe many newer laptops have certain bios settings trying to hamper booting of alternate OSes. Check your bios too.

Here is some further links for you:


https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Du ... th_Windows

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation ... th_Windows

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot

Good luck and have fun!

*Always remember to excercise caution and practice on spare PCs first!

I'm a bit unqualified to answer since I've been windows freeeee for a long time, but as fleadog mentioned, you would install linux as UEFI boot, not MBR.

Some of my systems boot UEFI by having a /boot partition, a /boot/efi partition, and then the rest. The non-boot partitions can be encrypted, but /boot can't use traditional LUKS encryption.

It depends on what the BIOS wants. There is good doc for Ubuntu here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI or arch here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Un ... _Interface . Macs are going to be different.

Now, is UEFI a long-needed update of boot record technology, or another step in microsoft control? Both, really.

For the most part I like the idea of EFI, if not the implementation. But then I was one of those people ten or fifteen years ago that shoehorned a linux bootloader into the BIOS chip on a few PC's. My biggest concern now is that it will be used to try to restrict alternate OS's under the guise of security, while throwing in so many marketing features (like a network stack + browser) that the effort itself becomes inherently insecure and a liability.

Well, thanks for your replies.

To a beginner like myself, all this sounds very complicated and I'll have to do a lot of work to get up to speed in this area. My impression before attempting the installation from the disk was that the Grub program would be automatically placed on the appropriate part of the hard drive as a standard part of the process, and would bring up a dual boot screen on startup. Clearly the whole business is not nearly so straightforward, especially when the UEFI factor comes into play.

I have a small capacity (80 GB) spare blank hard drive on which I may try installing a version of Linux as the sole operating system, but even that sounds potentially problematic, not least because I know from past experience that this particular laptop has to be semi-dismantled to change the HDD.

If you're less sure, then go for Ubuntu. Its default installer is pretty friendly to this kind of thing, including double boot. See, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot . Or you can boot from a side drive to get your feet wet.

Part of the pleasure of Linux is that you learn a lot while you do it. It makes you more powerful to do more tasks in deeper ways, instead of trapping you in one fixed way. And many of those skills are marketable.

But, I admit this does have a double edge. Arch has about five double edges, so don't start with that one.

Update on my earlier Linux installation experience:

I decided to try again to get a Linux OS onto my hard drive.

Attempt 1:
With the laptop set up to boot from the internal DVD drive, and with secure boot disabled, I fitted a blank (but not new) hard drive to the laptop, with the intention of installing Ubuntu from a live disk which was already in the DVD drive. Seconds after switching on, the screen displayed the message "SELECTED BOOT IMAGE DID NOT AUTHENTICATE. PRESS 'ENTER' TO CONTINUE". When I did so, the machine just produced a bleeping sound. I tried to get into the BIOS to reset it to boot from the DVD, but the whole machine seemed to be locked up, with no response to any of the keys.

Attempt 2:
In desperation, I refitted the original hard drive, which had Windows 8.1 on it. When the machine was switched on again, it booted successfully into Windows. I decided to try another dual boot installation, and it was now possible again, after restarting, to get into the BIOS menu (which had somehow reset itself to its default option, ie booting from the internal hard drive) and set it to boot the live UBUNTU disc. However, the result of the subsequent installation attempt was exactly the same as the earlier experience with Mageia - the OS seemed to complete its installation successfully, but it was only possible to get into Windows from the HDD, the new Linux partition being completely inaccessible.

Attempt 3:
As a last throw of the dice, and with no expectation of success, I tried the second installation option offered on the live disc, which was to delete the Windows and Linux partitions from the HDD, and install Ubuntu as the sole OS. When this process terminated, I restarted the computer, and to my astonishment found that I now had a fully functioning Ubuntu operating system on my hard drive . I'm a bit disappointed to have lost the Windows 8.1 system, as it worked perfectly well, but I have a 'System Image' back up of it on an external HDD and a copy of the original recovery partition on a USB device. So I can easily restore it. Or can I....?


What really interests me here is the first of these experiences. The ' selected boot image' that did not 'authenticate' presumably referred to the HDD, but the boot device which had last been selected was the DVD drive - why did it not load up from that, whatever the state of the hard drive? And why could the booting process from the DVD drive not be restored until the original HDD had been put back in place? Does this mean that I couldn't in fact restore Windows onto a blank internal HDD if the presence of such a thing causes the laptop to be unusable?

That sounds like a HP / EFI "security" feature. If so, you'll need to disable secureboot and enable legacy boot mode in the BIOS settings.

Right, or just roll with it and follow the secureboot uefi instructions. Ubuntu does that if you want.