Arch Linux

harwiltz

Member

From: Montreal, QC

Registered: 2014-08-24

Posts: 1

Website

Setting up Dual Boot on a laptop with an HDD and an SSD?

Hello,
I've had a Lenovo Y500 laptop for about a year now, and I'd really like to run Arch on it. I've been using Arch on a virtual machine for a while now, and I have tried other distros like Gentoo and Slackware, but Arch is by far my favorite. I find myself spending most of my time on Arch with only 1GB RAM and 32GB hard disk space allocated, when I could be on my 8GB RAM Windows machine.
The laptop has a 1TB HDD which is split into two partitions, a 883GB C: drive(entitled Windows OS) and a 25GB D: drive (entitled Lenovo), and a 16GB SSD which I imagine is for cache. I think I would like to allocate 256GB for Arch, since I really don't need much space to run Arch.
Obviously I have to set up another partition, but I really don't know how to do that, especially without screwing up my HDD and SSD configuration.
Any tips would be greatly appreciated,
Thanks a lot

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,612

Re: Setting up Dual Boot on a laptop with an HDD and an SSD?

Ensure you have read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Partitioning

Gparted worked very well for me several years ago when I re-sized the (gack!) Vista partition that came on this laptop to make room for a real OS.  I had no problems -- be advised that this is a BIOS machine.  Be sure you back up anything important to you before you start.

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Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: Setting up Dual Boot on a laptop with an HDD and an SSD?

The lenovo drive is probably when the windows goes kaput, so its a backup. if you don't need it, then you can remove it and utilize that space. Since you have an SSD, I would also read up the relevant wiki pages and set up some Arch partitions in the SSD thereby making Arch faster.

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