Tag: software

README! There are many use cases for dual booting and guides for achieving it, this one concerns moving an existing Linux to a drive on which Windows is already installed and dual booting them. In other words, you will be combining existing Windows and Linux systems to coexist on the same hard drive.

I’ve been using the same hard drive for a while and transporting it from laptop to laptop whenever one would fail me (you can do that with linux). Now, after 8 years, I was fearing it was the actual hard drive that would break next so this time, I had to move my actual operating system to another physical disk.

Wanting to be able to dual boot into windows as well, I was stuck in a scenario for which there was not much help on the web. Here’s what I did:

1. Resize your Windows partition using the disk management tool to make room for Linux and its swap. The new Linux partition must be larger that the one you are moving from.
2. Reboot to a Linux live CD or GParted and create a bootable Linux and a swap partition (they must be primary) after the Windows partition.
3. Clone you existing Linux OS partition from the old hard drive to the new.
   1. Plug in your old drive (external SATA, external disk case, extra hard-drive bay, etc.) but leave it unmounted.

   2. dd if=/dev/sdXY of=/dev/sdWZ bs=1M

      where XY is the drive letter and partition of the Linux OS you are moving from and WZ those of the partition you are moving to.

   3. Wait for a while, depending on the size of the partition, this could take a bit because you are cloning every single byte from one partition to the other. In my case, it tool a good solid two hours and half.
4. Unmount and disconnect your old Linux OS hard drive. In case something goes wrong, simply popping it back in your computer will restore your setup just the way it was before.
5. Mount your new Linux partition.
6. From within the Live CD, restore the GRUB2 bootloader by executing

   grub2-install --root-directory /mountPoint /dev/sdW

   where mountPoint is where you new Linux partition is mounted and sdW is the drive where it resides.

7. Since the partition’s GUIDs have changed you need to update the /etc/fstab file on your Linux with the new ones. Any file editor will do. Look up the new GUIDs for your new OS and swap partitions by running

   ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid/

8. Remove the live CD and restart the computer.  From within GRUB2’s boot menu, you should only see your Linux and not Windows, that’s normal. Boot your Linux OS.
9. Run

   grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

   GRUB2 will scan your hard drive, find the Windows install and create a new boot configuration file. Now, when you reboot your machine, you will see Windows within the boot menu menu entries.

10. Finally, since the size of the underlying partition holding your Linux installation has changed, the size of the file system has to be updated as well:

    resize2fs /dev/sdW

Done! Moving operating systems around and getting them to cohabit alongside each other is tricky and far from being straightforward so I hope this guide worked for you. You will most likely have to adapt it to your own situation and if you feel something you did could benefit others, please comment.

Note (09/01/17): also worked on a recent upgrade from 23 to 25.

I had put off system upgrades for so long that I found myself having to go from Fedora 20 to 23. It took a while but everything was going smoothly until I hit Fedora 23 on. There, after the mandatory reboot, hooking up my secondary monitor would freeze the display and screen repainting on some programs (like Eclipse) had become problematically slow and CPU demanding. This being Linux, I scoured the web on a quest to find some clues on what was not configured correctly but nothing came up. I’m running an AMD A6-3420M APU and while AMD provides driver for that chip, they are according to reports very finicky and a pile of trouble to get running.

I resorted to simply downgrading the driver. It was working correctly in the past, so I could see no obvious reason an older version would not do it this time.

First find the version of the driver currently installed:

dnf info xorg-x11-drv-ati

Which should spit out something along the lines of:

Installed Packages
Name        : xorg-x11-drv-ati
Arch        : i686
Epoch       : 0
Version     : 7.6.0
Release     : 0.4.20150729git5510cd6.fc23
Size        : 151 k
Repo        : fedora
Summary     : Xorg X11 ati video driver
URL         : http://www.x.org
License     : MIT
Description : X.Org X11 ati video driver.

So the faulty driver is version 7.6.0. Now, run:

sudo dnf --showduplicates --allowerasing --releasever=24 downgrade xorg-x11-drv-ati

Here, we’re asking dnf to go look in a previous release of Fedora for an earlier version of the driver. If the problems you are experiencing appeared with a recent update, you could avoid the –releasever argument altogether to just revert back to the previous version.

If the downgrade does not work, you rerun the command to roll back the driver even further in the past, but if after a couple times you haven’t had success, the issue probably lies with another package so run a dnf update to and take your investigation elsewhere, maybe the kernel, wayland, X, the window composer or gnome-shell.

When you update your system in the future, you’ll have to run:

sudo dnf --exclude=xorg-x11-drv-ati update

Otherwise, dnf will reinstall the broken later version of the package. This command will also give you packages with broken dependencies. That’s normal, those are packages that share dependencies with the one you have downgraded and for all I know could actually have been the ones causing you trouble. Just let them be.

Make sure you check back from time to time if another version of the offending package has been released by issuing a simple dnf update and checking the version now available.