SOLVED Windows 10 Dual Boot but MX Linux doesn't show up

[ronjnk]

Fehlix... I've understood the vast majority of the information you and other members have supplied and your explanation of having the SATA set up for RAID makes sense with the individual devices set for Non RAID.

But you lost me with repairing GPT tables by using gdisk. I will go in and disable the RAID function and set it to AHCI. That should be easy. Then I was going to completely reinstall Windows 10 from the bootable lenovo recovery USB I made. In theory, it will restore the computer back to the original factory installation.

I am assuming 2 things when I do this. The BIOS configuration I have done: RAID to AHCI and secure boot set to off will reamain that way. Reinstalling windows will not change those 2 settings.

I am also assuming that during reinstall, the process will completely wipe out that SSD drive, reformat the whole thing and then set windows and various windows partitions up as if the computer were brand new.

Am I wrong in my line of thinking? Is there something with the SSD drive that is now broken and needs repair that the windows installer can't correct? Thank you!

[fehlix]

Fehlix... I've understood the vast majority of the information you and other members have supplied and your explanation of having the SATA set up for RAID makes sense with the individual devices set for Non RAID.
But you lost me with repairing GPT tables by using gdisk.

That would be a nice excersise, to check whether we could recover from this "UEFI/RAID/GPT" disaster.
And you would not loos to much as you prepared to reinstall anyway.
How to do this: in booted MXLive:

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sodo apt install gdisk

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sudo gdisk /dev/sda

It will check the gpt disk and might guide you how to fix

I will go in and disable the RAID function and set it to AHCI. That should be easy. Then I was going to completely reinstall Windows 10 from the bootable lenovo recovery USB I made. In theory, it will restore the computer back to the original factory installation.
I am assuming 2 things when I do this. The BIOS configuration I have done: RAID to AHCI and secure boot set to off will reamain that way. Reinstalling windows will not change those 2 settings.

Yes, the installation will not touch the BIOS-SATA settings.

I am also assuming that during reinstall, the process will completely wipe out that SSD drive, reformat the whole thing and then set windows and various windows partitions up as if the computer were brand new.

Am I wrong in my line of thinking? Is there something with the SSD drive that is now broken and needs repair that the windows installer can't correct? Thank you!

Sometime the recovery media only re-install winOS, and do not recreate the disk as factory delivered.
So you could alread shrink/reformated to NTFS or leaf the existing win-partitions to the size you want to keep,
the installtion process ( at least with my expiriences) would than take this partition to install winOS on it. And you would already have free space for Linux...

[ronjnk]

I'm back. I wasn't sure of the timing of any response and decided to go ahead with the windows reinstall before I got info on using gdisk. It took me about 5 hours to finally get windows 10 back up and running.

I went to windows disc management and there were only 3 partitions. Then I went to MX USB and fired up Gparted. That same drive shows 6 partitions in Gparted.

/dev/sda1 efi partition 260 meg
/dev/sda2 Microsoft Reserved partition 16 MEG File system unknown
/dev/sda3 Basic Data Partition 237 Gig Windows
unallocated 1.0 meg
/dev/sda4 basic data partition 995.meg Recovery
unallocated 5.34 meg

I believe I'm going to crash and burn again unless I deal with the unallocated spaces before I try to install.

I ran gdisk now and here is the result. I don't know what it means nor what I do to get rid of the unallocated space.

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oot@mx1:/home/demo# sudo gdisk /dev/sda
GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 1.0.1

The protective MBR's 0xEE partition is oversized! Auto-repairing.

Partition table scan:
  MBR: protective
  BSD: not present
  APM: not present
  GPT: present

Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT.

Command (? for help): ?
b	back up GPT data to a file
c	change a partition's name
d	delete a partition
i	show detailed information on a partition
l	list known partition types
n	add a new partition
o	create a new empty GUID partition table (GPT)
p	print the partition table
q	quit without saving changes
r	recovery and transformation options (experts only)
s	sort partitions
t	change a partition's type code
v	verify disk
w	write table to disk and exit
x	extra functionality (experts only)
?	print this menu

Command (? for help): 

Does the above mean anything to anybody? Should I deal with the unallocated space before trying to install? Should I try to at least format those unallocated spaces in ext4 and would that make the installer happy? Do I need to do anything while in gdisk? Thanks! Ron

PS- I believe I am responsible for the 1 meg partition. I went and shrunk windows partition to prepare for MX install, went to Gparted and saw I had an unallocated space. Went back in windows to unshrink volume to see if that would correct it and instead, created an orphan 1 meg unallocated partition. I don't believe shrinking the volume would create that other orphan volume. It looks the same size yesterday before the new windows 10 install. Also note, SATA behavior was changed to AHCI before windows install. That created an extra drive. The 16 gig optane memory stick is now an available drive showing.

[fehlix]

PS- I believe I am responsible for the 1 meg partition. I went and shrunk windows partition to prepare for MX install, went to Gparted and saw I had an unallocated space. Went back in windows to unshrink volume to see if that would correct it and instead, created an orphan 1 meg unallocated partition. I don't believe shrinking the volume would create that other orphan volume. It looks the same size yesterday before the new windows 10 install. Also note, SATA behavior was changed to AHCI before windows install. That created an extra drive. The 16 gig optane memory stick is now an available drive showing.

All is good. Actually you made a nice gap between partitons, which is a good as some tools sometimes require a little space between partions when it comes to repair in emergency cases. I do intentionaly keep often 4 MB between partitions as it helps in case of damage to repair. gdisk reported no errors on the GPT table at start which is good

[ronjnk]

By golly, we have lift off! Complete success!

I have no clue what created the hassles for the last few days since I rolled right through the install this time and I'm not aware I did anything different between windows shrink and MX install. Of course I did do some things in BIOS and I did a complete new reinstall of windows. I also started out with an MX 18 Linux that was beta originally and maybe that had a glitch? The splash screen comes right up with a boot menu. WoW. Awesome.

I am absolutely thrilled to have this working and I can't thank every contributor enough for their help and suggestions. I will have another problem to cipher out getting that 500 gig hard drive as a common data storage between the 2 OS but I'll work on it and if I get stumped, I'll start a new thread.

Please give me a day to summarize exactly what I did to get this running so hopefully it might help others as well. And then I'll mark it solved. Thanks folks! Have a good night, Ron

[Paul..]

Ron, you get the prize for sticking to it...

[richb]

I love a success story. You can marked it Solved by editing the first post of the thread with {Solved} in front of the title.

[fehlix]

Complete success!

You made it.

[ronjnk]

I'd like to wrap this thread up with a summary of how I dual booted windows 10 home edition and MX18.

The computer was a brand new Lenovo M720 tower with a 240 G SSD drive, 500 G Hard drive and 16 G Optane memory. On my first attempt to create a dual boot computer, I essentially destroyed windows 10. The computer went into an endless loop of diagnostics and unable to fix things. The recovery partition was ruined in the process.

Here's what I ended up doing with the help of the forum.

1. Downloaded the most recent version of MX18 and created a bootable USB stick using Rufus.

2. Downloaded from the Lenovo recovery website, a new windows 10 recovery USB drive.

3. In BIOS, I disabled secure boot (F1 at start + security tab + secure boot), Configure SATA as AHCI (F1 at start + devices + ATA drive setup + configure SATA as + AHCI) NOTE: This was a funky setting with RAID likely associated with the OPTANE memory stick so that the OPTANE looked a part of one drive. Once changed to AHCI, the optane memory became another available drive.

4. Reinstalled windows, cursed that it took so long, cursed that it seemed to freeze up. In actuality, it installed the OS in reasonable time. But then it went into a blue screen with a little box left hand top corner that said setup-working with a tiny bar at the bottom left. And it stayed that way for hours. But, on closer examination, that tiny bar at the bottom was a window. As soon as I maximized the window, it was a terminal waiting for me to hit any key to resume. GGRRRRR Then it spent another hour or more running terminal commands and restarting and finally got to an input screen for setup. Windows was installed.

5. Went into windows and disabled fast start up under power settings.

6 The drive where windows was installed was shrunk by right clicking on the start menu icon and selecting disk management. Essentially 230 Gigs was shrunk to 100 gigs of unallocated space for my particular needs. That unallocated space will be where MX 18 will be installed.

7. Went to MX 18 live installer and used the gparted tool to create 3 partitions. Roughly 31 G for root, 52 G for home and 16 G for swap and named each accordingly. On the next screen I carefully selected the dev partitions that were named correctly in the previous step and filled in each selection. I put boot in root. Review all the information and then let it rip on installation. When it came to the GRUB installer, ESP was selected by default and I went with it.

8. Completed the install process and rebooted. Menu screen came up and offered a number of entries but windows was not among them. Went into root terminal and updated GRUB by sudo update-grub Then rebooted. Windows was now on the menu and at start up, one can easily select the operating system. And MX18 Linux is at the top and will boot automatically. Perfect!

[Gordon Cooper]

A great summary thanks Ron. After seven pages of posts in this thread (plus uncounted cups of tea/coffee) you must know considerably more about dual booting MX with Win10 than most of us. Welcome to the Forum.