Proper way to install Linux on Sony Vaio?
 

Hello,

My Sony Vaio has been coming of age now and I've decided to install a linux distro on it once I've graduated from my university (seeing as how their services use a lot of MS products).

I don't have anything against MS, except that Windows 10 seems to run rather sluggish on my now 4 year old laptop. I don't predict downgrading will have any effect on it's performance, and have therefore focused my attention on Lubuntu.

The problem with that lies in not knowing whether I should just wipe/overwrite the drive or leave selective partitions on there.

Since space is not an issue, I'm OK with leaving the partitions there.

Incidentally, this laptop came with Windows 8 preinstalled. I've since upgraded it to Windows 10.

The partitions I'm mainly concerned about are the OEM and EFI partitions.

I'd like to preserve certain functions and make sure that if I ever need to--to be able to reinstall Windows on the machine.

I'm not well-informed on what the OEM and EFI partitions do nor of their significance, but I'm assuming they're there for a good reason.

Just FYI: I'm not planning to ever dual-boot. I've heard of and had bad experiences with dual-boot on a Vaio, so I'm not even gonna try.

With that all said and done, I'd like to know of the proper procedure needed to be taken to get what I'm asking for.

Tl;DR:
I have a Sony Vaio that came with Windows 8 preinstalled. I want to be able to make sure that a) the ASSIST function works later on and b) that Windows can be reinstalled if need be (later on).

The second requirement might seem odd, and I'm aware that Windows can be reinstalled just fine, but do the partitions in question hold any significance on licensing or installation?

In other words, can I completely overwrite my disk upon installation with what I have in mind?

Anything that comes to mind, details, instructions, guides, links, tutorials are all welcomed.

TIA

T.R.G.

Welcome to the forums!

Is it easy to access the hard drive in your Vaio? If so, one option is to simply remove the Windows hard drive, set it aside for safe keeping, and install a new hard drive (or better yet, a solid state drive or "SSD") for the Linux install. Inexpensive SSD's can be purchased for less than $100, and can really help with symptoms of "sluggish" disk I/O on older machines.

Hm...
 

I'm considering that actually, but I would like to get the most out of the thing before it finally bricks out.

An SSD would definitely be the best solution, but another question that pops into my head would be what happens once my current disk does eventually fail?

I guess I keep going back to the same thing, but do the OEM and EFI partitions hold any association with licensing or the like?

Before I touch up on that, I'll make sure to verify if I can replace my disk.

I had a sony vaio back when 800MHz was a beefy CPU. Linux installed fine. Except SuSE 7.0 and Mandrake 7.x which hung on probing the PCMCIA. Debian (woody) ran well on it as it allowed skipping the PCMCIA probe. I did eventually get SuSE 7 installed from the floppies and older install methods. SuSE 6.1 ran great on it out of the box. Except that ACPI and power / heat management sucked back then. And sonypi didn't work for the screen brightness control on my model, so it was eye blinding bright all the time. At least that's how it was 15+ years ago.

You shouldn't need to dual boot per say, you can boot from USB if you spam a hotkey at power on without having to ever see windows on most machines manufactured since 2006. Give a live distro a try. It should just work baring wifi and missing firmware. Most things older than six months old on a fairly recent distro do pretty well under linux IMO.

To update:

It's come to my attention that the OEM partition is most likely a recovery feature implemented by Microsoft.

According to this source, it's imperative that it stays there should I ever need to do a factory reset.

My question is: since I've updated to Windows 10 on this machine, would it have any significant impact later on should I decide to reinstall Windows after having written over my drive with my Linux distro of choice?

I get the feeling that this partition of all partitions needs to be there to validate the product key license for any future clean installations.

Is what I'm getting at correct at all?

If you boot and run from USB, you don't have to touch that drive or install. Otherwise dd an image of the whole device, so you can dd back what was originally there. That's what I do for my hp stream 11s, but the internal drive is only 32GB and copies/restores pretty fast.

If you got a sale on Acronis then I might say to use it. They have a uefi based live recovery media using Windows PE.

As with all MS stuff you ought to use the stated recovery methods on the technet site.

You may be able to easily run a free virtual machine on it and just live with it that way.

Could easily create a live usb. They run fine too. Get the fastest 3.0 drive you can get.

Various manufacturers (HP, Dell, Toshiba, Acer, etc.) create 'recovery' partitions in place of providing installation media. When you first boot windows, you should be prompted to create a recovery CD. You can of course, do this at any time. Booting the recovery CD and following the prompts will set the machine to factory defaults. That means any programs/software you installed and any personal data you have will be oerwritten so you would need a backup.

The EFI partition contains only files related to booting. If you were to install Lubuntu or any Linux OS, you will need this partition and need to install Lubuntu EFI and it will create a directory on that partition for it's boot files in addition to the windows EFI files.

Your licensing information should be on the system partition for windows as should the product key. Clicking the main menu button on windows 10 and entering in the search box: license.rtf should bring it up in wordpad. You can either print it out or copy it to some other media. Don't know about the product key but I'm sure a quick google will tell you how to access it.

If you are planning to keep windows and are worried about messing the install, you would simplify your life by installing to another drive or even installing it to a usb/flash drive. I have a basic install of Lubuntu 14.04 with little new software or data and it's under 4gb.

Thank-you
 

Thanks, that's all I needed to know.

I'll be sure to post an update of how it turned out.

Best,

T.R.G.