Re: Surprisingly cheap HP 255 G2 laptop; Wheezy possible?

[Joe <joe@jretrading.com>]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2014 17:01:09 +0100
Ron Leach <ronleach@tesco.net> wrote:

> On 22/08/2014 18:05, Joe wrote:
> >
> > I couldn't be bothered messing about with dual boot, so I carry a
> > pocket USB hard drive containing a sid installation, and also have a
> > sid on a VM in Windows. I use the latter for Linux-only software,
> > and the former for using public wi-fi.
> >
> 
>
> but ...
> (iii) Dual booting with Windows (this has W8.1) does seem, generally, 
> to be problematic; apparently W8 is thought to revert bootloader 
> configurations to 'Windows only' - as a prudent security measure -
> but with the result that Debian is invisible to bootloader (whether
> grub or not) at each restart.  (Nothing I looked at explained how
> Ubuntu gets around that, if it does - or even if that is actually the 
> problem.)  I searched quite a lot for more details about Debian, even 
> Linux generally, dual-booting with W8.1, but the only returns I found 
> were describing the difficulties.  I thought there was a recent
> thread here, as well, talking about the problems, but my searching
> has failed to pick it up so far, though we've an archive of deleted
> messages so I'll have a look through those.
> 
>

That's what I thought, so I couldn't be bothered trying. The BIOS in my
G1 has a 'legacy boot enable' switch, and I was expecting to need to
flip this between each boot of Linux or Windows, but in fact it isn't
necessary, it can be left enabled. From a cold boot (and Windows now has
various tricks to speed up boot that mean you need to say 'shutdown to
power off' very firmly) with the external drive installed I get a boot
options screen for a few seconds and one of the boot options is boot
device, which will allow choice between Win8 and external drive.

I was influenced by the fact that I have a netbook with a very small
and slow SSD, which is ludicrously expensive to upgrade, so I had the
external hard drive installation already. If I hadn't, I might have had
a go at the dual boot.

-- 
Joe