Windows Preparation:
- Downloaded the 64bit iso
- Downloaded and installed UNetbootin (as per USB tutorial) from https://sourceforge.net/projects/unetbo ... Netbootin/
- Used UNetbootin to unpack the iso on the USB stick to make bootable USB stick
- Side-Quest: had to uninstall ScanDisk software from the USB stick to make it actually bootable
BIOS Preparation
This took a while to figure out. No judging. This was all done using American Megatrends BIOS Version 300 VBIOS Version 1051.I021UX330UAR.001 - if you have a different BIOS, good luck. (This one has animated graphics that made two different people say "Oooo, Matrix!")
- Use the <esc> escape key to get into BIOS
- Press <F7> to switch to Advanced Mode (the animation stops)
- Boot->Fast Boot->Change to Disable
- Security->Secure Boot->Secure Boot Control->Change to Disabled (do NOT change back - more later)
- Boot->CSM Support->Change to Enabled. This is required to allow booting to the USB stick...
- Plug in the USB stick
- Reboot laptop
- Hit <esc>
- I ended up going to Boot->Boot Option #1 (Windows Boot Manager) and marking it DISABLED
- With the only option the USB stick, boot to the USB stick.
- Partition the HDD
- I went ahead and used the GParted software to resize the windows filesystem still smaller
- Made a linux swap space partition - I went with 16 gig (I open a lot of tabs...)
- Make the rest of the space the / partition (ext4). You may also do /home, etc.
- Made sure /dev/sda1 did indeed have boot flag (right click, there was a flags option)
- Made sure /dev/sda1 had the grub checkmark (There are other approaches that did not work well for me)
- Install!
- Reboot and remove USB stick
- Go to the BIOS and change CSM-Support back to disabled (Optional, but seems good)
- Do NOT turn back on Secure Boot (not optional, unless you have a better bootloader installed by default than I got)
The system now happily boots into SolydX! If I want to boot into Windows, I hit <esc> in the short time the ASUS prompt is there, and the BIOS lists Windows Boot Manager as an option. I pick that, and Windows happily boots!
What went wrong for me...
When I reset the BIOS to use Secure Boot, Windows 10 removed the grub bootloader and re-installed its own, and I could no longer boot into Linux. This was a pain. Hacked steps to get back to functionality (I am SURE there is a better way to do this; no judging):
Reinstall the Bootloader (Grub2's EFI (UEFI?) settings)
- Boot back to the USB stick. I could not get it to boot in UEFI mode.
- Mount the SolydXK installation and the boot partition: (used sudo fdisk -l to list the partitions)
- sudo mkdir /s
- sudo mkdir /b
- sudo mount /dev/sda1 /b # /dev/sda1 is the boot partition
- sudo mount /dev/sda6 /s # /dev/sda6 is my SolydX Linux / partition (only ext4 in the list!)
- Put a linux efi file back into the bootloader:
- find -name "*.efi" /s # only one option came up
- sudo mv /b/EFI/Boot /b/EFI/MS #in case I need to restore the MicroSoft efi bootloader
- sudo mkdir /b/EFI/Boot
- sudo cp /s/usr/lib/systemd/boot/efi/systemd-bootx64.efi /b/EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi # /s/usr/lib/etc was where I found the file
- Take a deep breath
- Reboot
- Magic! It works! Linux boots by default, Windows 10 on demand.
Hope that helps someone, and looking forward using my laptop again!
--Peter