My laptop originally shipped with pre-installed Windows 8, with a traditional hard drive. From the factory it was set to UEFI and Secure boot enabled. Shortly after purchasing it (used) last year I replaced the hard drive with a SSD. I had briefly tried to dual boot it, but it was not convenientwith the HP bios quirks. I set the Bios to compatibility mode and installed Mageia 4 by itself, which worked fine.
In order to assist in the testing of Mageia 5, I recently tried a dual boot install with a wiped SSD. I really don't need Windows 8.1, but some want or need it, so I thought I'd give it try. I have to say upfront, that I did get the dual boot working, but couldn't seem to avoid a trip into bios every boot to manually choose grub2-efi. It seems if the HP bios found a MS efi file, it would default to that. In the end, I wiped 8.1 off the SSD to avoid this annoyance, because I really don't like it anyway. What follows is my experience.
This is my travel computer, so I don't normally use it unless I'm traveling, so I had a few days to play around with it. A clean Windows 8.1 install is easier to do now than in the past. Previously I had to work around the HP modified version of windows 8 imaged on the "recovery' partition. Now you can download the the ISO or USB version on the Microsoft website. You don't need to know the product key, to either download it or install it, if the target computer originally shipped with it. The bios (in UEFI mode) will tell the MS installer what the OEM installed OS was. This is a huge improvement over trying to setup a dual boot clean install with only the recovery image from the manufacturer. You can go straight to 8.1 if 8 was the oem OS. One catch though, is the download is via a windows exe file which creates the iso (or USB image), and it does have to be done from within windows, of any flavor, on any computer. It does not have to be the "target" computer. Here's the link;
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... resh-media
I burned it to DVD and then used a USB DVD burner connected to the laptop for the Windows install. I turned UEFI on and Secureboot off in bios prior to the install. I did a simple install using the default MS partitioning scheme. A description and discussion of this is here;
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lib ... 24839.aspx
It looks like this;
an alternative is this;
Here are a description of the default MS partitions;
1) 300M Fat32 WinRE partition holds some MS command prompt tools for repair. You can delete this partition later, if you want. If you need these MS tools later, you can either use the bootable install media or download a free copy of Windows PE for from Microsoft, a bootable live media with Windows repair tools.
2) 100M Fat32 "System" (EFI) the MS equivalent of /boot/efi. This is really too small.
3) 128M MS super secret format MSR "Microsoft System Reserve"
4) Windows primary partition.
5)opt Windows recovery image.
Here's a discussion of ways to get the Windows installer to use a different partition configuration. It's halfway down the page.
http://superuser.com/questions/834765/h ... c-with-ssd
In my case, I did the default install, skipping the recovery image partition and giving Windows 80Gof my 256G SSD. Then i use the latest Gparted live CD and deleted the WinRE partition and then grew the "System" (/boot/efi) partition into that space, giving me a 400m /boot/efi. It would have been cleaner to do custom partitioning in the first place, but this did work fine.
I don't know if the problems with Gparted compatibility have been fixed or not, but it did work for me. You might want to use something else.
During the following Mageia 5 beta3 install, I mounted the /boot/efi partition, and let the Mageia install create /,swap, and home.
EDIT TO ADD: I used a Mageia 5 Beta 3 x86_64 DVD as my install source.
EDIT TO ADD: I disabled MS 8.1 "fast boot" prior to the modifying the windows partition or installing Mageia. A how to is here;
http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-disable- ... ndows-8-1/
I could boot into either OS fine post install, but I'd have to <esc>, then F9 to choose Mageia (by name) in BIOS. As said before, it would default to MS. Both the MS and Mageia .efi files were in the /boot subdirectory of /boot/efi/EFI along with the MS and Mageia subdirectories. When I deleted the MS entries, then it would boot automatically into Grub, however, then I couldn't boot into windows from grub2-efi.
Tomorrow will be the last day I can play around with this for awhile,as I'll be traveling for a few weeks. If anyone would like me to try something, I'll give it a go. Like I said earlier, this isn't really a problem for me, but it would be nice to have a little nice solution for others to use that must have Windows. Later I'll probably try a Windows 8.1 virtual machine form inside Mageia.
1st Edit: added Mageia install source
2nd edit: I added note that I disabled Windows 8.1 "fast boot" prior to install of Mageia.
3rd edit: for > from