Dell Inspiron 15R, Windows 8, UEFI and Mageia v2 or v3

[persistability]

I know v3 is due out today(?). I have a Dell Inspiron 15R laptop here with UEFI+SecureBoot enabled and boots into Win8. Turning off SecureBoot I can get to the DVD and boot into a Mageia 2 install DVD ... and presumably install it (resizing the Win8 "OS" partition). My question is, will that totally work in providing me with a Dual boot UEFI Mageia v2 + Windows8 system ? Will the resultant Grub menu work, and allow dual boot with UEFI ? (i.e is the bootloader with Mageia v2 UEFI compatible?). Obviously Mageia v2 has a kernel 3.4.x and this is apparently not Microsoft-signed for UEFI (and I gather Mageia v3 using kernel 3.5+ will be signed).

So should I just wait for v3 to be released and try to install that ? Anything else to be aware of with this laptop and O/S combo?

TIA

[Lebarhon]

Hi,
I don't know anybody having succeeded that yet. If you turn off Secureboot, Win8 won't boot anymore and Mageia can't boot with it. Moreover, Grub Legacy can't work with UEFI, you need Grub2 which is shipped with Mageia 3 only. You have some threads about this challenge on this forum.

[persistability]

I can actually boot Windows 8 with "UEFI=yes, SecureBoot=no" or "UEFI=yes, SecureBoot=yes", so switching SecureBoot off doesn't seem a problem

Thx for your reply, I'll wait til Mageia 3 is out and install that and see what happens

[Lebarhon]

Do you have Win 8 32b or 64b ? Secure boot isn't compulsory for 32b.

[persistability]

I have windows 8 64-bit.

Mageia3 install
On to installing Mageia 3. I wanted to resize the Windows 8 "OS" partition and set my own partitions in the space. I set the laptop to use "legacy boot" (i.e hit F12 on Dell logo to select Boot device) and selected DVD. It then went into the usual Mageia install process.

Partitioning
Got to the partitioning and selected "custom disk partitioning". I set up my "/", swap, and "/home" partitions in the space. When selecting "Done" it came back with "writing disk partitions", and then "need to reboot computer to use new partitions" (why? in Mageia 2 it didn't need this AFAIK). At reboot I selected DVD again (was this correct?) and it started the install again, but when getting to the disk partitioning shows my new partitions but has the partition type as "0xba" for all whether they were ext4 or swap ... why ???

Edit : just rebooted a further time and this time it allows me to specify custom partitions ("/", "/home", "/usr/local") and then formats them, so presumably the problem just before was one of resizing the Windows partition ... so surely Mageia install should just do that and force a reboot then?

For reference, after the resize of the Windows 8 partition, on the next reboot into Windows 8 it sat there "repairing the disk" (expected?) and eventually started ok

Anyway, install continues after I finally got to format the Linux partitions, install packages etc.

Bootloading
Finally gets to bootloader install. I select "grub2" and when it tries to install the bootloader I get

grub2-install failed: /sr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: warning: this GPT partition label contains no BIOS Boot Partition; embedding won't be possible.
/usr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: warning: Embedding is not possible. GRUB can only be installed in this setup by using blocklists. However, blocklists are UNRELIABLE and their use is discouraged..
/usr/sbin/grub2-bios-setup: error: will not proceed with blocklists.
... propagated.

WTF? Presumably this is https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8462 ???

In the end I just installed "grub" (legacy) and have Win8 bootable by default (not desired) and can hit F12 and select Legacy Boot -> Hard Disk, and it boots Mageia (wherever Grub put its loader, presumably the MBR?). So the question is, now that I have Mageia3 installed and Win8 in a different partition, how can I get it to have a menu at boot for Mageia and Windows 8 and have Mageia as the default. For the record my partition info is

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 21G 4.5G 16G 23% /
devtmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 1.9G 860K 1.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1.9G 508K 1.9G 1% /run
/dev/sda7 21G 4.5G 16G 23% /
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 1.9G 404K 1.9G 1% /tmp
/dev/sda1 496M 49M 448M 10% /media/win_
/dev/sda2 36M 512 36M 1% /media/win_2
/dev/sda9 96G 261M 96G 1% /home
/dev/sda10 207G 60M 196G 1% /usr/local
/dev/sda4 500M 271M 230M 55% /media/win_c
/dev/sda5 100G 39G 61G 40% /media/win_d
/dev/sda6 14G 13G 280M 98% /media/win_e

/media/win_ has a directory "EFI"
/media/win_c has a directory "BOOT", "recovery", "System Volume Information"
/media/win_d is the Win8 install
/media/win_e has a directory "DELL", "Preload", "System Volume Information"

Now I understand "legacy boot", putting the boot loader into the MBR of the disk etc, but don't understand UEFI well enough to know how to configure "grub2" to enable this Mageia3 install to be accessible using UEFI. Anybody know how I can now run "grub2" and get the desired boot menu offering of Mageia and Win8 (default=Mageia) ???

TIA

[persistability]

Simple answer : seemingly not currently possible with Mageia. Can get a successful result with either of Fedora 18, or OpenSuse 12.3 with no user configuration ... both install DVDs boot with UEFI, create an EFI partition, and boot fine. In the case of Fedora 18 it ignores Win8 and doesn't put it in its Grub menu, whereas OpenSuse 12.3 does include Win8 in its grub menu (so that is the option I will go with). Obviously the install of Mageia I'd see as much slicker, but for this particular machine and requirement it doesn't match up right now. Hopefully that will be fixed soon ?

[doktor5000]

Hopefully that will be fixed soon ?

Not for Mageia 3, as the released images won't be update unless major problems occur.
You could add it as a proposed feature for Mageia 4, though: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Category:Pro ... ureMageia4

[persistability]

Think that's already covered by https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10161 which I only found after trying it (and wasting time).

[wintpe]

Just my narrow minded opinion, but just dump windows 8.

you dont need it, mageia does it all.

and if for some reason you need some app that just wont run under linux, run windows XP or windows 7 in virtualbox.

regards peter

[persistability]

the machine isn't mine, and its owner needs some legacy app(s) for small tasks that aren't runnable under VirtualBox etc, and that requirement isn't going away (and they won't be the only ones with such a requirement). [My own machine(s) run nothing but Mageia]

[mithion]

So I'm contemplating getting a new laptop next month to get away from the anemic performance of my HP netbook. Chances are this new laptop will come with windows 8. The current conclusion is that Mageia 3 and Windows 8 can't setup side by side?

[persistability]

The closest I got to that with the Dell was set BIOS to use "legacy boot" and it boots Mageia, and then when you want Win8 set the boot to "UEFI" and it boots Windows, but a pain to have to go into the BIOS each time. Also the BIOS you get on your laptop may not have all of those options. I have OpenSUSE working quite happily with a boot menu, and its just KDE once you're logged in anyway.