Has anyone had any issues with setting up dual boot with the UEFI? I recently picked up a Dell Inspiron 17R 5720 with an i5 running Windows 7 and it has the standard BIOS along with EUFI. Ive always just wiped the hard drive for linux but was thinking of setting up a dual boot this time so I can run windows when I have to do some work.

It gives you the option to stay with the standard BIOS, which is how I left it but I was reading how people are having issues when running dual with this EUFI. Will I be good as long as I keep it in the standard BIOS or do I have to do some further prep?

Any insight would be great.

Thanks

Yes I have attempted a dual boot in the past with UEFI and it would not work. It prevented me from booting into either operating system after GRUB was setup.
I ended up have to fix the master boot record to get Windows booted up again.

If you find a way to get it working without issues, I would be happy to find out how you did it!

I'm sure others here could give you a better answer than I could.

As far as I can remember, Windows will not boot from a GPT disk in legacy mode; you have to use native UEFI mode. And as it is very dangerous to use different boot modes for Windows and Linux (because you're bound to use the wrong one some day and screw up the whole system), that means that you have to use UEFI boot for Linux too. But I think you can still install Linux in legacy mode if you have an installation disk that won't boot any other way; you just have to make sure to install GRUB to the EFI system partition and not to the MBR.

Is this something which putting /boot on a USB thumbdrive might help with? The only computer I have modern enough for these issues to be a thing is a Dell Inspiron N5050 i3 I recently rescued from the trash. I was confused by the boot options, but I think I got everything to work with legacy mode. I was kind of surprised it all just worked like normal (first installed Windows 10, then installed Debian 8). But I just formatted the 120GB SSD in my usual way (not GPT), so I guess that's why everything just plain worked.

Another computer I have is a second hand Mac Mini i5. When I went to install Debian 8, I was just confused by the partitioning. To try and keep things safe, I just shrunk the Mac partition first, then installed Debian 8 on an ext4 partition in the freed up space. I was wary of trying to install GRUB on the Mac Mini's hard drive, so instead I put /boot and GRUB on a USB thumbdrive. Well, that works just fine. The only annoying thing is that there's no option with a Mac to give boot priority to a USB thumbdrive. I have to connect a keyboard and hold <alt> on boot every time to boot from the USB thumbdrive.

Since that worked for me with a Mac Mini, I'm guessing a similar solution will work for UEFI boot laptops? Or do the relevant BIOS settings typically disallow this from working?

Hi,

I am actually dual booting Windows 10 and Slackware Linux on UEFI. Before that I used to dual boot Slackware and Windows 8 on UEFI. It is not a big deal.

However, from experience I can say Windows 7 works better with the Legacy BIOS mode. It will probably not boot in UEFI mode.

So I would recommend you keep it in BIOS mode as long as you use Windows 7. If later you upgrade to Win10, then you can think about UEFI. But, beware, upgrading Windows while dual booting will probably erase GRUB.

It is not difficult once you know some UEFI basics. The first time I tried dual boot on a HP laptop, I inadvertently set up a mixed boot mode environment which trashed the whole system. I ended up having to restore windows 8 from the recovery DVDs. Once I read Rod Smith's ebook on UEFI, I didn't have a problem. I am not familiar with Dell. The various laptop vendors implement UEFI differently. HP's UEFI is a bit troublesome. ASUS much easier to work with. That said, I have an HP laptop with windows 10 and five different linux distros, all on one SSD. Dual boot is no different than triple and quadruple boot. With UEFI, the process is scalable up to a large number.

1 members found this post helpful.

I only have one uefi machine, and I actually prefer the uefi setup to the old bios setup.

Some tips I've picked up:

1. make sure the linux OS you are using can actually install and use UEFI boot mode. This is not true of all distros (linux lite being a notable one, only supporting legacy-bios mode, at least the last time I checked).

2. I generally make sure that in the system UEFI settings that Secure Boot is disabled. I've also seen on Dell machines a "compatibility mode" which allows windows to boot in UEFI mode but removable media (like your liveUSB/CD of linux) will default to bios boot mode. Which confuses the hell out of the grub install routines of some linux distros. I disable the "compatibility mode" to avoid the weird mixed environment.

3. Use whatever system your windows boot is already using to avoid issues with booting windows.

My Bios on my IBM 430 lets me set up my bios as so

Legacy Boot > enabled

Uefi secure boot > enabled

My AntiX 15 hard drive boot up just fine and dandy on it. But, my Windows 10 hard drive sits in the laptop bag <where it belongs>.

Cool, thanks for all the feed back! Much appreciated! I just never had to deal with dual boot before or even had the option between Legacy/UEFI so Im kinda lost on this whole process.

It seems like my Dell only supports UEFI in network boot anyway and Legacy supports the HHD, USB, Removable, Network, etc...Secure boot also seems not to work unless your in UEFI as well so its currently off in Legacy

I don't plan on upgrading further than Windows 7 anyway, not a fan of 8 or 10....So if I leave it in Legacy with secure boot off and dual boot kali along side windows 7, do you think it would work out?

I have UEFI on my laptop, I successfully installed debian 8.5 and created a dual boot so yes it can be done. Check to the left, there is windows 10 icon indicating the operating system I am using to make this post. Stay tuned, I will reboot into my debian 8.5 and post further.

Look left now, I am making this post from Debian 8.5 linux. When you do install linux, try to make the root directory a good size to allow for applications. On my list is to resize my root partition. When you do put linux in don't expect windows performance.

Yes, it will be perfectly fine. Just make sure Kali Linux understands you are using BIOS instead.

And as plasmonics said, UEFI is not difficult once you understand how it works. So later when machines will come in UEFI-default, you'll know you can certainly make a dual boot work. Linux is so versatile.

Cheers.

As a follow up, you can find out if your live CD or installed linux distro booted up in UEFI mode by running the following bash command as root:
I am less familiar with Windows, but I believe msinfo32 command should confirm one way or another.

Ok thanks guys, I really appreciate the reply's....Ill attempt to get it done this weekend so Ill let you know how it goes