Monday, May 22, 2017

Throwing in F25 into a machine running W10

Well, I did this today. I was on W10+Ubuntu 16.04 combo till now. Unfortunately for me, my Ubuntu was unaware of my HP240 hardware drivers. I went completely offline as both my wireless, ethernet, and BT were not recognized by Ubuntu. On top of that, I could not find cdc_ether drivers to tether using my mobile. After some struggle with trying different kernels, I decided to try F25. I used F25 media writer for windows. The first issue was that the link provided in Fedora download page does not have latest writer. https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/download/ points media writer version 4.0.8 which crashed before starting after installation. But, you get the latest from here and it will work (4.1.0 worked for me).

I used a 16 GB driver and after I booted to this drive, I installed fedora on my Ubuntu partition after deleting it. However, the installer cried out about not having GPT partition for boot loader. I just told it not to install a boot loader. I was hoping that I could get it installed after the OS is installed.

After OS was installed, I booted to HDD. It was stuck at grub. It will not proceed beyond that point as I have destroyed Ubuntu partitions and grub was looking for those partitions. All I got was a recovery shell of grub. I booted again to F25 USB stick installation. Did a chroot to newly created partition and tried almost all that was told here. No way. Error after error. My Sunday was getting spoiled. Just reminded me of those golden words about Sendmail....

I was getting disturbed. Decided to take a sure to work shortcut. Did the following.

  1. Went and bought another 32 GB pen drive
  2. Again booted to USB Linux image and downloaded Windows 10 dvd from Microsoft site and wrote it to a DVD. (No, I did not have to use this.)
  3. Took a back-up of MBR to pen drive
  4. Installed syslinux and recovered MBR (I was skeptical about effectiveness of doing this for W10 as it was suggested for every version of windows except Windows 10)
  5. After that step, my machine was able to boot to Windows (Hurray... a tiny step close to normalcy)
  6. Deleted the partitions in new 16 GB pen drive and also all Linux partitions from HDD
  7. Started the install to HDD process and selected both sda and sdc (pen drive) as target for installations
  8. Set pen drive as boot device and gave installer control over making partitions. It did a very good job by creating boot and EFI folders on pen driver and swap space and root on free space available in sda.
  9. Installation was complete and I removed all external drives and booted the device to Windows 
  10. Later I plugged in the pen drive and viola, and the device boots to Linux
I will take some time later and figure out how to avoid the pen drive. But till then, I have a working laptop that has both W10 and F25