Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

Martificiam · 2013-08-10 09:23:18

Hello everyone.

I have bought an ASUS X501A laptop with preinstalled Windows 8. I'd like to completely remove Windows (wipe the whole hard drive clean) and install a fresh copy of Arch Linux. Are there any precautions before doing so? The disk currently has an EFI partition, but I'd like to recreate that one while installing Arch. Is it safe to delete the EFI partition along with all others before installing Arch?

graysky · 2013-08-10 09:26:46

Odds are that your official windows 8 copy image is on its own partition. This is how vendors seem to do it these days. Wiping the entire disk will remove that... odds are you can nuke the entire disk, efi boot and all. Why not just keep the efi partition and wipe the rest? Just use a gdisk to do this once you accept what I said above.

jasonwryan · 2013-08-10 09:33:11

Martificiam wrote:

Is it safe to delete the EFI partition along with all others before installing Arch?

Yes.

cfr · 2013-08-15 01:37:55

I did this with Windows 7 without ever booting it.

With Windows 8, just make sure to disable Secure Boot in your BIOS. (But you can do this after wiping Windows if you like.)

EDIT: One good reason to wipe the lot and redo the partitioning is that Windows often uses a small EFI partition. It is recommended you make this at least 512M (so 550M is a good size to use in gdisk and avoids the M/Mi confusion).

Last edited by cfr (2013-08-15 01:41:26)

WonderWoofy · 2013-08-15 03:55:38

I also did like cfr and wiped the disk upon arrival of the machine. Just beware that some hw vendors only offer bios updates through windows, so you might want to check to see if there are any updates to the firmware before wiping.

I have a Thinkpad, and Lenovo will actually send you free recovery disks if you are still within the wrarranty period. So even if you do wipe you disk, if you want windows 8 back, you might be able to get the disks still. But as far as I know, there is no longer a free download for an installation iso like there was for windows 7 (the digitalriver thing). So just know what you're getting yourself into.

xXxhyperbolaxXx · 2013-08-23 02:35:00

Whenever I have deleted windows I end up losing that data. I used cfdisk and delete the windows paritions on this old laptop and ended up losing the 3 GB that windows was using. Is there a proper way to wipe out windows?

WonderWoofy · 2013-08-23 02:39:20

xXxhyperbolaxXx wrote:

Whenever I have deleted windows I end up losing that data. I used cfdisk and delete the windows paritions on this old laptop and ended up losing the 3 GB that windows was using. Is there a proper way to wipe out windows?

I really don't understand what is being asked here. When you delete a partition, you lose data… is this not what you expected? Or are you saying that you are losing usable space (which is not actually possible short of chunks of HDD going bad)? What are you asking here?

xXxhyperbolaxXx · 2013-08-23 02:46:08

lol sorry that was badly worded. I lose usable space. In other words, says if my hard drive was 350 GB and windows was on a parition of that is 25 GB then only 325 is avaible after deleting the partition and installing arch, even though cfdisk claims 350 is available.

cfr · 2013-08-23 03:01:25

You have to extend an existing partition or create a new one and then extend or create a filesystem on it in order for the OS to see the space as usable. Is that what you mean?

srs5694 · 2013-08-23 03:15:01

It's also possible that you're running into units confusion. Some utilities use power-of-10 units (kB=1,000 bytes, MB=1,000kB, GB=1,000MB, TB=1,000GB, etc.), whereas others use power-of-2 units (KiB=1,024 bytes, MiB=1,024KiB, GiB=1,024MiB, TiB=1,024GiB, etc.). Sometimes it's not clear which unit a utility uses, and occasionally they use the wrong unit suffixes (typically using kB, MB, etc. in reference to power-of-2 units). Note that these differences are fairly small for small units (kB vs. KiB), but they become larger for larger units. By the time you get to TB vs. TiB, the difference is close to 10%, so 1TiB = 1.1TB.

WonderWoofy · 2013-08-23 03:15:52

How does wnidows measure disk space? Is it in Megabytes or mebibytes (or gigabytes or gibibytes)? Because that differentiation could be what you are seeing. Still there is not really enough information to give you any kind of a real answer.

rufus · 2013-08-23 03:58:39

Removing Windows can be very dangerous.
once its gone you wont have anyone bugging you for money constantly and figuring out every angle to get it from you...
so Id advise against it.

xXxhyperbolaxXx · 2013-08-23 05:10:15

cfr wrote:

You have to extend an existing partition or create a new one and then extend or create a filesystem on it in order for the OS to see the space as usable. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, my system views the Windows parition as being gone. When I was installing I deleted my Windows partition and created new partitions then formated them, but the amount of space originally occupied by the windows partition is viewed by Linux as unusable.

jasonwryan · 2013-08-23 07:00:08

rufus: please read the Forum Etiquette and note our guidelines around respecting other operating systems and empty posts.

Also, second time in as many days your posts have been reported. Try thinking before typing...

nomorewindows · 2013-08-23 16:50:24

xXxhyperbolaxXx wrote:

cfr wrote:
You have to extend an existing partition or create a new one and then extend or create a filesystem on it in order for the OS to see the space as usable. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, my system views the Windows parition as being gone. When I was installing I deleted my Windows partition and created new partitions then formated them, but the amount of space originally occupied by the windows partition is viewed by Linux as unusable.

You probably need to reclaim that space contiguously. If you've routed your linux partitions around that one Windows partition, it may leave holes in your mbr partition table. If you reextend any extended partitions to now include that space, you'll have all of your space back. This may require using gparted to get everything nice and tidy back into order.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-08-10 09:23:18

Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#2 2013-08-10 09:26:46

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#3 2013-08-10 09:33:11

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#4 2013-08-15 01:37:55

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#5 2013-08-15 03:55:38

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#6 2013-08-23 02:35:00

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#7 2013-08-23 02:39:20

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#8 2013-08-23 02:46:08

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#9 2013-08-23 03:01:25

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#10 2013-08-23 03:15:01

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#11 2013-08-23 03:15:52

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#12 2013-08-23 03:58:39

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#13 2013-08-23 05:10:15

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#14 2013-08-23 07:00:08

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

#15 2013-08-23 16:50:24

Re: Removing preinstalled Windows 8 and starting from scratch with Arch

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