Fedora - Windows 8/8.1 dual boot

[Quicksort]

Has anyone successfully installed Fedora 18, 19 or 20 in dual boot with Windows 8/8.1 ?
How does the installation process differ from setting up a Fedora/Windows 7 or XP dual boot ?
Are there pitfalls one should know about ?

[Richard Vickery]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Quicksort" 
To: "Fedora users list support for Fedora users" 
Sent: Wednesday, 15 January, 2014 16:40:11
Subject: Fedora - Windows 8/8.1 dual boot

Has anyone successfully installed Fedora 18, 19 or 20 in dual boot with Windows 8/8.1 ? 
How does the installation process differ from setting up a Fedora/Windows 7 or XP dual boot ? 
Are there pitfalls one should know about ?

[Chris Murphy]

On Jan 15, 2014, at 8:38 PM, Richard Vickery  wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Quicksort" 
> To: "Fedora users list support for Fedora users" 
> Sent: Wednesday, 15 January, 2014 16:40:11
> Subject: Fedora - Windows 8/8.1 dual boot
>
> Has anyone successfully installed Fedora 18, 19 or 20 in dual boot with Windows 8/8.1 ? 
> How does the installation process differ from setting up a Fedora/Windows 7 or XP dual boot ? 
> Are there pitfalls one should know about ? 
> --
>
> I haven't personally used Windows 8/8.1, but after a friend's experience with it, and subsequent erradification of this platform in favour of Fedora, many knowing the choice would want to stay as far away from 8x as possible.

The main issue is if pre-loaded it comes with UEFI Secure Boot enabled. Fedora supports this out of the box. It can also be disabled. Some things that might come up whether it's enabled or not:

1. No more MBR, primary or extended partitions. Windows on UEFI requires GPT so that's what Fedora will continue to use.

2. Don't use grub2-install. The installer puts a prebaked grubx64.efi on the EFI System partition. It shouldn't be necessary to replace it although if grub2 is update, then the pieces on the ESP are also updated.

3. In the unlikely event you need grub.cfg recreated the command is grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg

4. Most likely grub2-mkconfig / os-prober will not locate Windows, and will not create a grub boot menu entry for it. You'll need to figure out how to use the built-in EFI boot manager to choose between Windows and GRUB(Fedora).

5. There's a scant number of reports of install failures when the installer can't write the new boot entry to NVRAM. The resulting system is unfortunately not bootable, but with some effort can be made so. There's a thread on the test@ list about this. And also bug 1006304.

That's all I'm thinking of at the moment.

Chris Murphy

[Ahmad Samir]

On 16 January 2014 06:39, Chris Murphy  wrote:
[...]
> Most likely grub2-mkconfig / os-prober will not locate Windows, and will not create a grub boot menu entry for it. You'll need to figure out how to use the built-in EFI boot manager to choose between Windows and GRUB(Fedora).

I had installed windows 7 UEFI mode, and grub2-mkconfig  automatically
added an entry for it:
menuentry 'Windows Boot Manager' {
          chainloader /EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi
          boot
}

[...]

[Paolo Galtieri]

On 01/15/2014 04:40 PM, Quicksort wrote:
> Has anyone successfully installed Fedora 18, 19 or 20 in dual boot 
> with Windows 8/8.1 ?
> How does the installation process differ from setting up a 
> Fedora/Windows 7 or XP dual boot ?
> Are there pitfalls one should know about ?

I have install F19 on a system with Windows 8/8.1 installed.  The 
install process created the grub menu entry, however, I cannot boot 
Windows 8.1 from the grub menu.  I get the following:

/EndEntire
file path: 
/ACPI(...)/PCI(2,1f)/UnknownMessaging(12)/HD(1,800,...)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot)/File(bootmgfw.efi)/Endntire

error: cannot load image
error: you need to load kernel first

Press any key to continue ...

The "Press any key to continue" message must be a joke, because a few 
seconds after I get these messages the system reboots.  I had to try to 
boot Windows several times to get enough of the first message.  The 
"..." in the file path message indicates that there is stuff there but I 
couldn't get it written down do to the system rebooting after about 10 
seconds.

The only way I can boot to Windows is to keep hitting F12 until I get 
the boot order menu, and select Windows from there.

Paolo

[Steven Rosenberg]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 4:40 PM, Quicksort  wrote:
> Has anyone successfully installed Fedora 18, 19 or 20 in dual boot with
> Windows 8/8.1 ?
> How does the installation process differ from setting up a Fedora/Windows 7
> or XP dual boot ?
> Are there pitfalls one should know about ?

I started my current system out by adding Fedora 18 to a Windows 8
system with UEFI. The installer took care of everything, and it worked
out of the box. Since then I've done fedup upgrades to F19 and F20.
--
Steven Rosenberg
http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog
http://blogs.dailynews.com/click

[Ahmad Samir]

On 17 January 2014 21:05, Paolo Galtieri  wrote:
> On 01/15/2014 04:40 PM, Quicksort wrote:
>
> Has anyone successfully installed Fedora 18, 19 or 20 in dual boot with
> Windows 8/8.1 ?
> How does the installation process differ from setting up a Fedora/Windows
> 7 or XP dual boot ?
> Are there pitfalls one should know about ?
>
> I have install F19 on a system with Windows 8/8.1 installed.  The install
> process created the grub menu entry, however, I cannot boot Windows 8.1
> from the grub menu.  I get the following:
>
> /EndEntire
> file path:
> /ACPI(...)/PCI(2,1f)/UnknownMessaging(12)/HD(1,800,...)/File(\EFI\Microsoft\Boot)/File(bootmgfw.efi)/Endntire
>
> error: cannot load image
> error: you need to load kernel first
>
> Press any key to continue ...
>
> The "Press any key to continue" message must be a joke, because a few
> seconds after I get these messages the system reboots.  I had to try to
> boot Windows several times to get enough of the first message.  The "..."
> in the file path message indicates that there is stuff there but I couldn't
> get it written down do to the system rebooting after about 10 seconds.
>
> The only way I can boot to Windows is to keep hitting F12 until I get the
> boot order menu, and select Windows from there.
>
> Paolo

It could be that the Fedora installer created a separate ESP (EFI system
partition) and didn't just use the existing ESP that windows had already
created. (IIRC that bug was fixed in F20 and the installer now mounts the
already existing ESP as /boot/efi). You can tell if there's more than one
ESP by using 'fdisk -l' or 'parted -l'.

If that's the case then the easiest way is to consolidate the two ESP
partitions and use the one that windows had already created, have a look at
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?p=1661415#post1661415
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