Dual boot windows 10 and linux uefi

How to Install Linux Mint 20 Alongside Windows 10 or 8 in Dual-Boot UEFI Mode

Linux Mint 20 has been released in wild by the Linux Mint project development team as a new long term support edition which will receive support and security updates until 2025.

This tutorial will guide you on how you can install Linux Mint 20 in dual-boot with a variant Microsoft Operating System, such as Windows 8, 8.1 or 10, on machines with EFI firmware and a pre-installed version of Microsoft OS.

If you’re looking for a non-dual-boot installation on Laptop, Desktop, or Virtual Machine, you should read: Installation Guide of Linux Mint 20 Codename ‘Ulyana’.

Assuming that your laptop or desktop system comes pre-installed with Windows 10 or Windows 8.1 or 8 you should enter the UEFI menu and disable the following settings: Secure Boot and Fast Boot features.

If the computer has no pre-installed OS and you intend to use Linux and Windows in dual-boot, first install Microsoft Windows and then proceed with Linux Mint 20 installation.

Download Linux Mint 20

In case you own a UEFI computer stay away from the 32-bit version of Linux Mint because it will only boot and work with BIOS machines, while the 64-bit ISO image can boot with BIOS or UEFI computers.

Step 1: Shrink HDD Space for Dual-Boot

1. In case your computer comes pre-installed with Microsoft Windows on a single partition, logon to Windows system with a user who has administrator privileges, press [Win+r] keys to open run prompt and type the following command in order to open Disk Management tool.

2. Right-click on C: partition and select Shrink Volume in order to resize the partition. Use a value best-suited for you, depending on your HDD size, on the amount of space to shrink MB field (minimum 20000 MB recommended) and hit Shrink button to start the process of resizing the partition.

3. When the process finishes a new unallocated space will appear on the hard drive.

Close Disk Management utility, place Linux Mint DVD or USB bootable image in the appropriate drive, and reboot the computer in order to start with Linux Mint 20 installation.

In case you’re booting Linux Mint for installation from a USB dive in UEFI mode make sure you’ve created the bootable USB stick using a utility such as Rufus, which is UEFI compatible, otherwise your USB bootable drive won’t boot.

Step 2: Installation of Linux Mint 20

4. After reboot, press the special function key and instruct the machine firmware (UEFI) to boot-up from the appropriate DVD or USB drive (the special function keys usually are F12 , F10 or F2 depending on the motherboard manufacturer).

Once the media boot-up a new screen should appear on your monitor. Choose Start Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon and hit Enter to continue.

5. Wait until the system loads into RAM in order to run in live-mode and open the installer by double-clicking on Install Linux Mint icon.

6. Choose the language you wish to perform the installation and click on the Continue button to proceed further.

7. Next, you should select your keyboard layout and click on the Continue button.

8. On the next screen hit on the Continue button to proceed further. Third-party software (multimedia codes) can be automatically downloaded and installed on this step by checking the check-box.

The recommendation would be to leave the box unchecked for the moment and manually install proprietary software later after the installation process completes.

9. At the next screen, you can choose the Installation Type. If Windows Boot manager is automatically detected you can choose to Install Linux Mint alongside Windows Boot Manager. This option ensures that the HDD will be automatically partitioned by the installer without any data loss.

The second option, Erase disk and install Linux Mint, should be avoided for dual-boot because is potentially dangerous and will wipe out your disk.

For a more flexible partition layout, you should go with Something else option and hit on the Continue button to proceed further.

10. Now let’s create the partition layout for Linux Mint 20. I would recommend that you create three partitions, one for / (root) , one for /home accounts data and one partition for swap .

First, create the swap partition. Select the free space and hit on the + icon below. On this partition use the following settings and hit OK to create the partition:

Size = 1024 MB Type for the new partition = Primary Location for the new partition = Beginning of this space Use as = swap area 

11. Using the same steps as above create the /(root) partition with the below settings:

Size = minimum 15 GB Type for the new partition = Primary Location for the new partition = Beginning of this space Use as = EXT4 journaling file system Mount point = / 

12. Finally, create the home slice with the below settings (use all the available free space to create home partition).

Home partition is the place where all documents for user accounts will be stored by default, except the root account. In case of system failure, you can reinstall the operating system for scratch without touching or losing the settings and documents of all users.

Size = remaining free space Type for the new partition = Primary Location for the new partition = Beginning Use as = EXT4 journaling file system Mount point = /home 

13. After finishing creating the partition layout, select the Windows Boot Manager as the device for installing the Grub boot loader and hit on Install Now button in order to commit changes to disk and proceed with the installation.

Next, a new pop-up window will ask you if you agree with committing changes to disk. Hit on Continue to accept changes and the installer will now start to write changes to disk.

14. On the next screen choose your nearest physical location from the map and hit Continue.

15. Enter a username and a password for the first account with root privileges, choose your system hostname by filling the computer’s name field with a descriptive value and hit Continue to finalize the installation process.

16. The installation process will take a while and when it reaches the final step it will ask you to hit on the Restart Now button to complete the installation.

17. After reboot, the system will first boot-up in Grub, with Linux Mint as the first boot option which will be automatically started after 10 seconds. From here you can further instruct the computer to boot in Windows or Linux.

On computers, with newer UEFI firmware the Grub boot loader won’t be displayed by default and the machine will automatically boot-up in Windows.

In order to boot into Linux, you must press the special function boot key after the restart and from there to further select what OS you wish to start.

In order to change the default boot order enter UEFI settings, select your default OS and save the changes. Review the vendor’s manual in order to detect the special function keys used for boot or for entering UEFI settings.

18. After the system finishes loading, log in to Linux Mint 20 by using the credentials created during the installation process. Fire-up a Terminal window and start the update process from the command line by running the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade

That’s it! You have successfully installed the latest version of Linux Mint 20 on your device. You will find the Linux Mint platform to be very robust, fast, flexible, enjoyable, easy to use, with a ton of software required for a normal user already installed and very stable.

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Dual booting Windows and Linux using UEFI

A quick rundown of setting up Linux and Windows to dual boot on the same machine, using the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI).

Rather than doing a step-by-step how-to guide to configuring your system to dual boot, I’ll highlight the important points. As an example, I will refer to my new laptop that I purchased a few months ago. I first installed Ubuntu Linux onto the entire hard drive, which destroyed the pre-installed Windows 10 installation. After a few months, I decided to install a different Linux distribution, and so also decided to re-install Windows 10 alongside Fedora Linux in a dual boot configuration. I’ll highlight some essential facts to get started.

Firmware

Dual booting is not just a matter of software. Or, it is, but it involves changing your firmware, which among other things tells your machine how to begin the boot process. Here are some firmware-related issues to keep in mind.

UEFI vs. BIOS

Before attempting to install, make sure your firmware configuration is optimal. Most computers sold today have a new type of firmware known as Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), which has pretty much replaced the other firmware known as Basic Input Output System (BIOS), which is often included through the mode many providers call Legacy Boot.

I had no need for BIOS, so I chose UEFI mode.

Secure Boot

One other important setting is Secure Boot. This feature detects whether the boot path has been tampered with, and stops unapproved operating systems from booting. For now, I disabled this option to ensure that I could install Fedora Linux. According to the Fedora Project Wiki Features/Secure Boot Fedora Linux will work with it enabled. This may be different for other Linux distributions —I plan to revisit this setting in the future.

In short, if you find that you cannot install your Linux OS with this setting active, disable Secure Boot and try again.

Partitioning the boot drive

If you choose to dual boot and have both operating systems on the same drive, you have to break it into partitions. Even if you dual boot using two different drives, most Linux installations are best broken into a few basic partitions for a variety of reasons. Here are some options to consider.

GPT vs MBR

If you decide to manually partition your boot drive in advance, I recommend using the GUID Partition Table (GPT) rather than the older Master Boot Record (MBR). Among the reasons for this change, there are two specific limitations of MBR that GPT doesn’t have:

• MBR can hold up to 15 partitions, while GPT can hold up to 128.
• MBR only supports up to 2 terabytes, while GPT uses 64-bit addresses which allows it to support disks up to 8 million terabytes.

If you have shopped for hard drives recently, then you know that many of today’s drives exceed the 2 terabyte limit.

The EFI system partition

If you are doing a fresh installation or using a new drive, there are probably no partitions to begin with. In this case, the OS installer will create the first one, which is the EFI System Partition (ESP). If you choose to manually partition your drive using a tool such as gdisk, you will need to create this partition with several parameters. Based on the existing ESP, I set the size to around 500MB and assigned it the ef00 (EFI System) partition type. The UEFI specification requires the format to be FAT32/msdos, most likely because it is supportable by a wide range of operating systems.

Operating System Installation

Once you accomplish the first two tasks, you can install your operating systems. While I focus on Windows 10 and Fedora Linux here, the process is fairly similar when installing other combinations as well.

Windows 10

I started the Windows 10 installation and created a 20 Gigabyte Windows partition. Since I had previously installed Linux on my laptop, the drive had an ESP, which I chose to keep. I deleted all existing Linux and swap partitions to start fresh, and then started my Windows installation. The Windows installer automatically created another small partition—16 Megabytes—called the Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR). Roughly 400 Gigabytes of unallocated space remained on the 512GB boot drive once this was finished.

I then proceeded with and completed the Windows 10 installation process. I then rebooted into Windows to make sure it was working, created my user account, set up wi-fi, and completed other tasks that need to be done on a first-time OS installation.

Fedora Linux

I next moved to install Linux. I started the process, and when it reached the disk configuration steps, I made sure not to change the Windows NTFS and MSR partitions. I also did not change the EPS, but I did set its mount point to /boot/efi. I then created the usual ext4 formatted partitions, / (root), /boot, and /home. The last partition I created was Linux swap.

As with Windows, I continued and completed the Linux installation, and then rebooted. To my delight, at boot time the GRand Unified Boot Loader (GRUB) menu provided the choice to select either Windows or Linux, which meant I did not have to do any additional configuration. I selected Linux and completed the usual steps such as creating my user account.

Conclusion

Overall, the process was painless. In past years, there has been some difficulty navigating the changes from UEFI to BIOS, plus the introduction of features such as Secure Boot. I believe that we have now made it past these hurdles and can reliably set up multi-boot systems.

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