I recently acquired an Acer Aspire TC-605 tower. This machine came with Windows 8.1 pre-installed (since upgraded to Windows 10). Of course, I wanted to add Slackware to it. This shouldn't have been a problem since I have done this to other machines and already have a USB drive which I made bootable using Slackware's
usbimg2disk.sh utility and added the packages to the drive that I wanted installed (everything except KDE).
Since this is my first experience with a UEFI machine, I followed Pat's
README_UFI.TXT closely. The first step was to disable the secure mode. Following advice from a Acer website, I also set the "Launch CSM" to "Always". The machine continued to boot Windows after this change. I have included screenshots of my BIOS setup below.
The next step was to create space on the 1TB hard drive. Window's
Disk management utility showed 5 partitions the main ones being Drive C and Drive D of 457.81 MB each. It was a simple matter to shrink Drive C by 50 MB and Drive D by 300 MB for Linux.
I then booted from the USB drive (hit DEL key and choose USB) and started up Slackware.
gdisk showed that there was already a partition with code EF00 so I didn't need to create one. I then used
cgdisk to create the two Linux patitions from the newly created free spaces (no need for a SWAP patition when you have 8G of RAM
).
I got a scare when
cgdisk reported errors writing the changes I had made but Windows still booted up and its
Disk management utility showed the two new partitions quite readily. (A screen shot is shown below).
So I continued with the Slackware setup. Things departed from the script when it came up to setting up
elilo. The
Setup utility didn't offer me that option. Also the USB boot stick that was recommended wouldn't work - complaining of a "kernal panic". I have included the Slackware commands I ran below:
Code:
# gdisk -l /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.7
Partition table scan:
MBR: protective
BSD: not present
APM: not present
GPT: present
Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.
Disk /dev/sda: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): A05A6760-996C-45DB-8F87-E438D32F845E
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 3437 sectors (1.7 MiB)
Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
1 2048 1230847 600.0 MiB 2700 Basic data partition
2 1230848 1845247 300.0 MiB EF00 EFI system partition
3 1845248 2107391 128.0 MiB 0C01 Microsoft reserved part
4 2107392 859801599 409.0 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
5 962201600 1307895807 164.8 GiB 0700 Basic data partition
6 1922295808 1953523711 14.9 GiB 2700 Basic data partition
7 859801600 962201599 48.8 GiB 8300 Linux System
8 1307895808 1922295807 293.0 GiB 8300 Linux Data
# mount
/dev/sda7 on / type ext4 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
/dev/sda2 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw)
/dev/sda8 on /home type ext4 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw)
# eliloconfig
ERROR: System is not running under UEFI.
As you can see, I can't run
elilo because the system is not running under UEFI (yet I can still boot straight into Windows 10). However, the MBR is labeled as "protective" so I am reluctant to use the ordinary
lilo in case it stuffs everything up.
I can still use the original installation USB drive to boot into my Slackware installation and it runs fine. I am tempted to quit while I'm ahead but maybe disabling the CSM might work. If I did that, what else would I need to do to make a genuine dual-boot machine?