My beloved SandyBridge I7 test platform died a couple months ago so that motivated me to replace it with something very new. I’m deep in the process of working with the new M8 Cauldron so I decided to cast the dice and purchased a brand new Dell Inspiron 5000 Laptop. I’ve had very good success with past Dell laptops and crossed my fingers that this one would be the same:
https://www.dell.com/en-us/member/shop/ ... n5593dssdh
10th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-1035G1 Processor
Windows 10 Home 64-bit English
Intel® UHD Graphics with shared graphics memory
8 GB, 1 x 8 GB, DDR4, 2666 MHz
256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
Dell Model# 5593, manufactured in 2020.
I’m trying to preserve the internal M.2 PCIe NVMe drive with Win10 on it and not disturb it. The laptop features USB 3.0 Ports and the BIOs is default set up to boot off the USB Ports. In BIOS turn off Secure Boot. Make a bootable Mageia USB Live-DVD drive and while booting tap the F12 key and select the UEFI USB drive, not the internal UEFI drive. And it should work just fine.
I purchased a 128GB Samsung FIT Plus USB drive and using the M8 x86_64 Plasma Live-DVD I installed M8 to the FIT Plus drive. Do note instructions below. That went wonderfully well so now can can dual boot between Win10 and M8 without disturbing the internal SSD. The speed of the FIT Plus drive is impressive.
To make sure I don’t change or damage the internal SSD during the install process I go into BIOs and disable the SATA channel. That ensures that the Mageia installer does not see that drive at all. Also using Gparted on an M7 machine I format to “clear” the FIT Plus drive of anything including partitioning. Therefore the Mageia installer sees a completely raw drive.
There are some minor wrinkles, and bugs, so far and notes on that will go into the M8 errata.