Saturday, April 25, 2015

Toshiba C50D-B-120 Part 2 - UEFI dual boot with Windows 8.1

I read a lot about people having problems dual booting Debian with Windows, and so worried about how it would go on my new Toshiba C50D-B-120.

In fact the installation with the Jessie RC2 installation CD was very easy- I used the graphical install and after choosing to install on the available free space, I simply used the default options, except for having a separate /home directory. The CD installed GRUB in the UEFI partition and when I rebooted I had Debian Jessie and Windows in GRUB!

Of course, to free up some space, I had to resize the Windows C: partition. Here's what the drive looked like:


Source: technet.microsoft.com

I used

diskmgmt.msc

and clicking on the Windows partition gave me a Shrink option. It didn't let me shrink Windows as much as I would have wanted. There are partition managers that would have allowed me to move unmovable files in Windows and shrink the partition more, but I suspect I'm going to install again and use the whole disc for Debian assuming everything is working properly, which so far it is.

I also disabled Fast Startup in Windows as described in Option 1 here.

Secure Boot wasn't enabled in Boot options (F12 on this Toshiba), but disabling it is necessary for a UEFI install.

Now all I have to do is decide if I want to keep Windows. Windows 8 isn't too bad once you ignore the tiles and tablet-like apps and boot straight to the desktop (on a laptop at least).

But it's a pain as far as updates go. I had to look at a blue screen telling me that Windows was configuring and not to shut off the computer for half an hour today. This seems to be a typical and frequent event when shutting down or booting up.

About the only reason I can think of for keeping it is that Toshiba puts out BIOS updates in .exe form- I have installed one already- a very easy process from Windows, maybe not so easy from Linux.

However, everything seems to be working, and I've just downloaded the Debian Jessie RC3 CD, so a reinstall using the whole disc may be immanent.






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