On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 14:38 +0100, Sean Gibbins wrote:
> On 14/04/13 13:35, Stephen Davies wrote:
> > Shame on you. No one in their right mind does that. :)
:-) How dare you! :-)
I just did the self-same thing because I needed a notebook or laptop
right now, no ifs, no buts. And it needed Windows, and sometime I have
to sest software with Win8, so it might as well start now.
> >
> > Take the time to go to Novatech and see what they have to offer.
+1
I bought an ASUS S200E notebook with Win8 preinstalled on it. They
couldn't supply it with a retail Win8, but I was also able _with_ the
ASUS to get a full retail Win8-Pro at a surprisingly good price.
Indeed dual boot can be done.
I did the Windows stuff I needed, than made the 'recovery disc' on a USB
stick (it wanted 20GB) on the basis that, even if I couldn't reinstall
in the event of a pear-shaped, I could at least revert to to the
original install and start over.
The first problem was finding how to get to the BIOS as the usual boot
screen with 'press DEL' or whatever didn't appear. It was hidden .. the
getting started documents, IIRC, give the clue.
I spent a while, then, trying to get anything to boot, before learning
that one needs to change a couple of things in the BIOS to let it. I had
of course to set the boot options, but also turn off "Secure Boot"
After that, my USB stick booted OK. At this point I used a 'remix' copy
of Ubuntu 12.04LTS, though IIRC I later repeated this with a standard
Ubuntu 12.10.
A brief explanation here. I'm told (not verified), that there has to be
a 'key' to allow booting, and that key is purportedly in the 'remix' and
Ubuntu 12.10 onwards. Not sure I'm convinced.
The advice was to boot the 'remix' copy as a standalone version and use
the "Boot Repair" tool on the desktop to adapt booting. They said "Just
accept the recommendation", so I did.
Then do the install.
I installed side-by-side and the remix-12.04 went on fine and seemed to
be working OK, including the touch-screen (single-touch, anyway).
Back out on Linux and reboot to Windows. Not. It won't boot.
Try the Boot-Repair again, no help.
Try several flavours on Windows repair, no help.
Try the recovery USB stick, ready to start over completely if necessary.
The USB recovery stick reports a missing partition and will not play!
Well, I try a bunch of other stuff, no success. Initially I give up an
just declare it a Linux-only machine, but I did want to test stuff with
Win8 and eventually I went back and tried some more.
What I did at this stage was try installing Win8-Pro on the original
Win8 partition, but the 'upgrade' process would not install onto an EFI
drive, only onto NTFS. I think I reformatted to NTFS, but it said the
same thing :-|
OK, full Win8-Pro install on that partition.
That seemed to go reasonably. I don't remember any particular issues
with it, except of course that there are now no vendor-supplied drivers
and applications. Since then, I've been downloading and installing
drivers, etc., from ASUS and most of that has gone OK (no Bluetooth, but
it's possible there's a fault).
So, now I have a dual-booting Ubuntu 12.?? and Win8-Pro system, both
halves apparently working OK (sans BT).
CAVEAT. You'll note from he above that I never got the shipped Win8-OEM
to install or recover. I was fortunate that I had the Pro version to
fall back on. I don't know what one does if one does not. You'll also
not that the 'recovery disc' _didn't_! About which I've made comment to
Microsoft. Maybe a backup disc as well would have helped?
FWIW, like many people, I think the Win8 "Interface that used to be
called Metro" pretty horrible, but then if you followed my views on
Unity, that will come as no surprise (IMHO at least Unity is better than
Win8). I'm told one can regain the old start-menu, but, as with Unity,
I'm going to try to live with the new flavour on Win for now.
Kind regards,
Gordon.
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