PreguntoYo, I agree with everything you say in your post. Obviously, Slackware 14.1 will support easier methods using eLILO to install Slackware in a multi-boot environment along with a pre-installed Windows 8, and perhaps it will even be possible to use UEFI with Linux.

I also share your reluctance to do anything potentially harmful, as I wouldn't want to damage the pre-installed OS, too. However, did your Windows 8 come with installation media? If so, check, if you could install the system on another computer. If not, and if your budget allows it, you might purchase Windows 8 Pro upgrade (buy a DVD, down't just download it, as there are reports, that only the DVD version supports the following). The steps are about these:

• Upgrade your pre-installed Win 8 with Win 8 Pro upgrade
• Enter the product key during the upgrade procedure
• Eownload the Win 8 Pro upgrade (although you already have the DVD, but the DVD installer doesn't offer you to create media!!!)
• Create installation media from within your running Win 8 Pro
• Verify that you can really install a full Win 8 from the created installation media, on another computer

The installation media can either be DVDs or a USB stick (use a 16 GB stick!). If all goes well, you can install Win 8 Pro from these media on any compatible computer, including the laptop from which you created the media, of course. The only trouble might occur when you try to activate the newly installed system, but this can be fixed by changing an entry in the registry. Search the web for "Win 8 clean install" or similar, if you are interested.
Of course, the EULA allows to install and run Win 8 on just one PC. That is, if you install Win 8 on another computer,you'll have to erase the original installation. Also, this method causes causts for Win 8 Pro upgrade (about 50,00 EUR) and the USB stick. But this investment will let you sleep well, as it allows you to re-install Win 8 in case something bad happens.

Having said all this, please don't blame me, if it doesn't work as expected. I haven't tried it myself, yet, but I am planning on doing so. I am just reading all this stuff, as I am in a similar position like you: I have a new laptop with pre-installed Win 8 and would like install and multiboot Slackware 14.1 along with it.

HTH

gargamel

No, I don't think you must inflict the EULA in any way to keep Windows 8 installation media; it's a backup question...

See, my new laptop came with a lot of partitions (welcome to the GPT future); something like:

sda1: WinRE (I believe this is for some Windows 8 recovery mode, I'm unsure)
sda2: ESP (EFI System Partition, important)
sda3: Windows 8
sda4: Windows' RAW data (???)
sda5: Windows' home
sda6: HP oem (or something like that, this one is important, too)

I'll check and edit this post later, if someone finds it necessary. But the important things are:

¡IMPORTANT! ¡PITFALLS AHEAD!

1. The last partition is some kind of Hewlett Packard's re-install system for Windows 8; it allows you to save your Windows 8 installation media into a 16 GB stick... ONE time. I think you should do this first, in a reliable USB stick. If you accidentally damage your system's Windows 8 copy, well, the USB will take the system back to the factory state, and that includes DELETING ANY LINUX PARTITION that you may have created. So not having to re-install Windows 8 is important, at least for me.
   
2. IMHO, second step should be something like dd if=yourUSB of=oneHDyoutruston, or else, you risk losing your Windows 8 installation media. Then later you can rebuild your USB in case of accident. BTW: newer laptops may come without DVD reader, like mine. It has it's logic, if you can wear 4 DVDs in your pocket. USB 3.0 is FAST.
3. You must select then which partition you're going to shrink (obviously sda5 in this case), and you should (?) do from Windows 8, because the disk manager will warn you that you can shrink the thing up to some point. Bad for you if you used gparted in the first time. Even worse; in my new laptop at least, Windows 8 doesn't shutdowns as you are used to in Linux, it kind of HIBERNATES. I've heard reports that if you modify the partitions in this state, Windows 8 won't like the finding when it restarts. The shutdown method must be modified from inside Windows 8.

...and well, these have been only the first three steps in dual-booting with Windows 8. There could be more, I'm not an expert.

More ideas?. Am I wrong in anything I wrote?. How does one continue from here?.

I am still playing with my PB Easynote.

I believe that on top of the OEM recocery USB disk (which is usually 15-16 GB and therefore cannot be a DVD) there should also be a way to make a standard Microsoft (not OEM) reinstallation media, which should be smaller and fit onto a DVD. In this case one should make sure to have the Windows activation key and all the necessary drivers backed up somewhere else.

By the way can anybody recommend a good Windows 8 related forum? I need to expand this matter further.

In order to have people address your issue directly and not get sidetracked, I would say you should start a new thread. The installation subforum would be the most correct place to put it, even though in practice, that forum isn't as visible as our regular forum and doesn't get as much traffic. But ReaperX7 has promised to help, so you should probably be okay posting your thread in the installation subforum and linking to it on this thread when you do. That way people who are following this thread can go there to help you.

I would offer help myself, except that it isn't something I have done before, and even though I am sure I could figure it out if it were my own computer, I am hesitant to experiment on yours. Probably many here feel the same. So it is good we have a few people like ReaperX7 who work with dual installations a lot and have already been down that road.

As an aside, one thing you could do is get an external hard drive and make a full clone of everything on your disk in case something goes wrong during this process. To do this, I would just boot from a live cd of some sort and use

or the equivalent. If you don't have an external hard drive this method may seem troublesome, but I do not know of any other way to get the same protection that can be used to restore everything so easily. I know that Windows has a System Image function that will make an identical copy of your boot partition on DVDs that you can use to restore the operating system with a Windows Recovery Disk, but I am not sure if that will recreate the ESP partition--and I can't imagine it would duplicate the HP OEM partition. (Although after you have used it "once," as they say [more Windows nonsense, IMO], it sounds like it would be pretty much useless anyway, so maybe the Windows System Image would work after all . . . but then again maybe not.)

Anyway, the important thing is to have a backup. I personally would go for the full clone instead of fussing around with a bunch of different Windowsy disks, but do what makes you comfortable.

Of course, you can make a backup, but you are not allowed to install and use the operating system on two machines in parallel. What I described allows to transfer the operating system to another machine, but if you do, you'll have to erase the system from which you created the installation media, AFAIK. If you don't wipe the system on the "source" machine, you'd end up with two operational installations of Win 8, which is not covered by the license, to my knowledge.

gargamel

1. The first thing you'll want to do with a Windows Vista/7/8 PC/Laptop is to boot it up and check for an OEM installed program to create a Rescue Disk, Boot Disk, or Installation Disk from Burnable Media. You'll want to create the Rescue Set PRIOR to anything you do with Windows. Once you've created this this, I also suggest you download and search for the Windows 8 Rescue Disk from Microsoft, download it, and burn it. It will boot like an installation media disk, but it only has the Rescue Tools on it. Keep it handy as it will come in handy from time to time.

2. Use the Windows Administrative Tools > Computer Management application to resize your Windows partition (shrink Partition) down to at least 100GB in size depending on how many operating systems will be installed. If you use only 2 operating systems (dual-boot) split the disk basically in half. If your partition contains an OEM maintenance or media partition, you can optionally delete it or leave it alone. Usually these are small partitions and are insignificant.

3. Now insert your Slackware installation media disk.

If the disk boots normally under UEFI mode without Legacy BIOS enabled you be fine, otherwise, enable Legacy BIOS mode and try again. Usually a disk will boot without Legacy mode.

4. Once booted, prepare your system for installation by loading the network and pcmcia tools by their respectively named commands, and start the installation by partitioning the drive with cgdisk.

Now, you're UEFI system should already have a UEFI partition usually in FAT32. Leave it alone!!!

Now in the free space create a swap partition with at least twice the amount of RAM you have in your system. (If you have over 8 GB of RAM, you can skip this step as 8GB will be more than enough to ensure you never need to swap on Slackware.)

Now create a Linux partition in the free space and enable it for boot status, save the work and exit. Now your system is prepped for installation.

5. Type in setup to start the installation. If you skipped creating a swap partition, you can skip the swap creation tool, and move on to disk partitioning.

Create a standard EXT4 partition in the Linux assigned partition, and process with the installation as you normally would.

6. After installation when it asks if you want to install LILO, skip this. DO NOT INSTALL LILO!

Use the Slackware install disk to boot to Slackware using the RECOVERY method as shown on the title screen, and setup everything as normal and launch the X.Org desktop you chose.

Navigate to your web browser and download, build, and install GRUB2 and all required dependencies from www.slackbuilds.org and follow the instruction on the website.

GRUB2 will and should automatically detect you have a UEFI system with GPT disks and install the appropriate bootloader into the UEFI partition, as well as detect and setup your Windows system. It may label your Windows 8 as a Windows Recovery Environment, but you can safely ignore this, or edit your grub.cfg file and reinstall grub2 as previously directed.

Be advised if you do update your kernel, I recommend you rebuild grub2's configuration again, and reinstall Grub2 to the UEFI.

If you need additional help Arch has a good How-To on how to install Grub2 to a UEFI system with more details.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GRUB

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Excellent thread. I hope you don't mind me going off topic for a second (MODS: if necessary I can create a separate thread).

I was originally set for dual booting Windows 8 and Slackware. I then though it was safe to remove the Windows data partition altogether, install Slackware and, if necessary, recreating it form scratch form the recovery partition or the USB recovery drive, but this answer to my question on the Microsoft forum:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...llReplies#tabs

put me off. In other words would I be able to reinstall Windows 8 from the recovery media, once the partition has been removed?

Thanks

The Recovery Disk set will recreate the Recovery Partition if used. This is due to the fact Hard drives can fail and need to be replaced.

Sorry for being pedantic, does it mean that the recovery partition still need the Windows partition or can I safely remove it?

If it works as in my new laptop...

After you have created a recovery media (CD or USB) using the OEM's tools (I hadn't heard of recoverydrive.exe), you could use the full system's HD, because the recovery media should re-create partitions and re-install all software back to factory state. Let me insist, IF it works as in my system.

Have a look at the HD, a user manual should be in some folder (as it was in mine's). Read it before any attempt.

Back up recovery media well. The OEM's ~16 GiB partition ain't redundant with it; there must be some key that you can press at start up to boot from this partition, and repair the Windows 8 installation in the other partitions, if Windows would have become non boot-able. You should be able to remove this partition with the OEM's own tools, but I wouldn't, if you want a dual-boot system with Windows 8.

Recovery partitions are small, so honestly, with today's modern hard drives, it's almost pointless to recovery the space. Most barely extend beyond 8-12 GB anyway (Dual-Layer DVD size), and just about all hard drives now have 250 GB or more when pre-installed by the OEM.

My laptop has Windows 7 Pro on it, but it also has a small 9 GB recovery partition I've left alone. I have 250 GB of space to play with, 100 GB for Windows and 100 GB for Linux, with the rest dedicated to an NTFS partitioned file box that is shared between both operating systems containing work and other files.