[arch-general] Installing Archlinux alongside Ubuntu on a Windows 8 UEFI laptop

[Alan E. Davis]

This looks interesting, and I am tempted to walk into the deep water.  It
raises some questions.

Will gummiboot or refind also find the Ubuntu partition?

The original partition structure of the machine there were four or five
partitions, and another one popped up in the higher end of the disk.   I
stumbled into the install, with the Ubuntu installer, and ended up with
four linux partitions in addition to the Windoze partitions.  At some point
I used gparted to resize, and this might have been the step that botched
the structure.  But in any event, I have three Linux partitions of 50G
each, and a swap partition.  Ubuntu is sitting in one of those partitions.

I have no idea what is an EFI partition.  I have seen instructions,
presumably for those who are wiping the Windows and starting from scratch,
to make an EFI partition.

I finally realized why there are so many partitions, and learned to use
gdisk when walking through the Archlinux install.

Here is a some information from the gdisk listing:

   Nbr   Size         Code   Name
  -----+------------+------+-------------------------
     1   1000.0 MiB   2700
     2   260.0 MiB    EF00     EFI system partition
     3   128.0 MiB    0C01    Microsoft reserved part
     4   49.6 GiB     0700      Basic data partition
     5   9.7 GiB      2700        Lenovo (?recovery?)
     6   10.0 GiB     8200       Linux SWAP
     7   49.4 GiB     8300       Archlinux /
     8   58.8 GiB     8300       /home
     9   1024.0 KiB   EF02     "bios_grub" (Ubuntu?)
    10   59.8 GiB     8300       UBUNTU /


Alan

On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 2:27 PM, Daniel Micay <danielmicay at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/05/14 05:07 PM, Alan E. Davis wrote:
> > This is insanity...   The first time I have encountered the much maligned
> > Micro$oft UEFI / Secure Boot adventure.  On my new Thinkpad Yoga, with a
> > Wacom active digitizer and pen.
> >
> > Ubuntu was a walk in the park.  I installed Ubuntu naively, alongside the
> > new Windows 8.1 laptop.  It took maybe an hour to break my resolve to
> take
> > my time.  It was a disconcerting experience.  I now have a system that
> > boots Ubuntu 2014.04, through a convoluted process of signing into
> Windoze,
> > then  backing out through advanced settings to boot from a Menu.   If I
> > were trying to lock in my customer base, I couldn't have designed it any
> > better, or made it any more uncomfortable, myself.  Ubuntu picks up the
> > Wacom pen, and almost everything else.  But it's not Archlinux.
> >
> > I am a bit fearful, but decided that Archlinux, which I am using on two
> > other machines, would potentially be the better choice.
> >
> > I have two more partitions, one of a /home and another for an Arch /boot,
> > so I went ahead and walked through the most of the install, except for
> > installing the boot manager.
> >
> > I am stuck now.  I don't want to compromise what I have already gained.
> > Now I need to learn how to set up the system to boot any of the three
> OSs.
> >
> > I am puzzled by the variety of approaches I have seen; hence, I am
> reaching
> > out here on the mailing list.
> >
> > I saw advice to use GRUB but install it in the boot PARTITION.  Not sure
> > how to do this, and not sure whether it will work.
> >
> >
> > Does this make sense to anyone?
> >
> > Alan
> >
>
> You shouldn't have a separate boot partition. Install gummiboot or
> refind to the existing FAT32 ESP partition and mount that as your /boot.
> It's *easier* than dealing with MBR/BIOS because you can do it entirely
> via EFI/Boot/BOOTX64 rather than messing with EFI entries.
>
>