Arch Linux

hayden620

Member

Registered: 2013-04-09

Posts: 7

[SOLVED] Dual Boot with a 16gb SSD and 1tb HDD on a w8 machine

Hey guys, so not to long ago I got a brand spanking new laptop preloaded with windows 8. I kinda downgraded it to windows 7.5 (start button, got rid of picture lockscreen, etc.) but it's hard to aviod how much it sucks. Programs crash left and right and it just doesn't float my boat. Now, it came with a 16gb ssd used for caching, witch speeds up my system, but not as much as it could, so heres my plan.

1) / and Boot partitions on 16gb SSD
2) Home and W7 (I have a key my friend gave me) on my 1tb HDD
(fyi thats the basic idea, I've got to get my whole LVM plan going too)

Now, I have some questions if you guys could help out:
1)W8 machines don't have a bios, I can load a live cd no problem, but could this affect my setup greatly down the road?
2)Do you guys have / partitions greater then about 15gb? is there a good secret tip to save space? (for example I've heard of storing pacman files in other places but I don't know too much about that)

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by hayden620 (2013-04-11 06:33:30)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] Dual Boot with a 16gb SSD and 1tb HDD on a w8 machine

Linux is small... here, check this out:

%  df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md127p1     15G  5.6G  8.4G  41% /
<snip>
/dev/sda1      1022M  146M  877M  15% /boot
<snip>
/dev/md127p2    9.8G  3.2G  6.1G  34% /var
/dev/md127p4    198G   30G  159G  16% /home

I removed the system mounts.

Also, I have a UEFI ThinkPad E430, and it works fine.  All UEFI machines have bios compatibility mode.  What you should be concerned about is secure boot.  But if you just turn that off, all will be fine.

Seriously though, this stuff is all in the wiki... documented so that people like yourself have easy access to the information.  You should go looking through there.

hayden620

Member

Registered: 2013-04-09

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] Dual Boot with a 16gb SSD and 1tb HDD on a w8 machine

Don't get me wrong, I love the wiki, I use it several times a day every day (i use a seperate machine with arch as a hobby to make it look awesome) and I did go through it over this topic. Problem is I've had my problems where I read only part of what I need to know, and not knowing about something incredibly important I end up going ahead and destroying my hard work at the end (*cough grub on my first install of arch when I didn't know jack and took me a couple hours to do the install as I had to learn everything which lead to a bigger dissapointment when it didn't work *cough). Plus I don't want to screw up my new computer if it's not posssible, as technically I still have a warrenty on it, bbbbuuuuuttttttt I can't stand windows anymore. Thank you anyways though, you put my mind at ease.

Last edited by hayden620 (2013-04-11 06:32:47)