Hard drive
(frugal) installation of Fatdog64 on a computer with UEFI
and secure boot.
This document describes installing
Fatdog64 on a computer with UEFI, with or without secure boot.
All Windows 8 computers come with secure boot enabled by
default. First you should make sure Fatdog64 boots and
works well on your computer. This can be done by booting from a
CD/DVD you burned after downloading the iso or by making a bootable flash drive. If your
computer is running Windows 8 with secure boot on, see the Booting with secure boot page. Please read this entire process before doing
anything. It might be best to take a look at step 5 and
see if you can do that on your computer before proceeding. Do not use the same fat32 partition that
Windows 8 uses for it's boot, usually sda1 and labeled ESP.
Windows 8 uses "Fast boot" aka hibernation by default and if you
write to that partition while Windows is hibernated, when
Windows resumes it will corrupt the ESP's filesystem. It's a
good idea to make a backup of the files on the Windows ESP, just
in case you do something stupid.
Step 1)
You will need some space on your hard drive to
create a couple of new partitions. Boot into Windows and then:
Right click on My Computer
Select Manage
Click Storage --> Disk Management
Right Click on the drive and click Shrink
Volume
Then
select the amount of space you want shrink your C: drive. Minimum
would be about 2Gb, more is always better.
In the
example below the C: drive is being shrunk by 40GB.
Step 2)
Boot into Fatdog64 from you CD/DVD/Flash drive.
If you booted from a flash drive, remove it after booting. Then:
Open the Control Panel
Click on the Utilities Tab
Double click on Gparted partition editor.
(Typical Gparted window with fat32
and ext4 partitions added. The Create new Partition window is
opened for demonstration.)
Right click on the
'unallocated' partition. This should be the same size that you
shrunk your C: drive in Windows.
`
Select 'New', the Create new Partition window will pop up.
On the File system pull-down menu select
'fat32'.
For 'New size (MiB):' enter 1000. That makes
1GB.
Enter a Label for the new partition, then click
Add.
Right click on the 'unallocated' partition again.
Select 'New', the Create new Partition window will pop up.
On the File system pull-down menu select 'ext4'
For 'New size (MiB):' enter what ever space is left.
Enter a Label for the new partition, then click Add.
After you're done adding partitions click Apply. When Gparted gets
done you can close it.
Step 3)
From the tray menu, click on 'Restart X
server'.
Click on the new fat32 partition you made to
mount it.
Copy the files from /usr/lib64/refind/ to your
new fat32 partition.
Copy vmlinuz and initrd from your bootable
CD/DVD/Flash drive to your new fat32 partition.
You new fat32 partition should look like this:
Step 4)
On your new fat32 partition, rename EFI/boot/refind.conf-frugal to
refind.conf.
Right click on refind.conf and select Edit With
Geany.
The refind.conf should contain this:
#
# refind.conf
# Configuration file for the rEFInd boot menu
# See the refind.conf-sample file for full
details.
timeout 10
banner fatdog.png
scanfor manual
menuentry "Fatdog64 Linux" {
icon /EFI/boot/icons/os_fatdog.icns
loader vmlinuz
initrd initrd
options
"savefile=direct:device:sda7:/fd64save"
(Change sda7 in this line to whatever your new
ext4 partition is. See boot options
for more info.)
}
menuentry "Fatdog64 without savefile" {
icon /EFI/boot/icons/os_fatdog.icns
loader vmlinuz
initrd initrd
options "savefile=none"
}
menuentry "Windows 8" {
volume ESP
(Change ESP to whatever your normal boot
partition is. Usually it's sda1 and usually it is labeled ESP.)
loader \EFI\Microsoft\Boot\bootmgfw.efi
}
Click on the new ext4 partition you made to mount it. Then create
a new directory named fd64save. You can skip this step if you want
to use a save file instead of a save directory, just modify
the options in your refind.conf file to reflect whatever you want
to name your save file.
If you have problems with refind not finding the ESP partiton when
booting , it may show an error like bootmgfw.efi not found. You
can try changing volume from ESP to 0: (That's a zero and a
colon. The zero represents the first partition. If the normal
boot partition is on sda2, then you would want "volume 1:".)
If refind still can't find the volume (partition) that the
Windows boot loader is on, you can install refind and Fatdog64's
kernel and initrd directly to the ESP, if it has the space
available. If you do this you must disable hibernation in
Windows. To do that open a terminal as the
administrator in Windows 8, and type powercfg -h off . The
reason for this is that Windows mounts the ESP and when it
hibernates it doesn't sync or unmount it. So if you boot
another OS, shutdown, and then un-hibernate (Fast boot)
Windows, the ESP's VFAT filesystem becomes corrupted.
Step 5)
Now reboot your computer and press f2 to enter
UEFI setup (Some computers use a different key to enter setup).
Then add your new fat32
partition as a boot option. Unfortunately this process varies
quite a bit. Here's the screen a Dell laptop presents:
For this particular laptop you have to disable
secure boot to use the "File Browser Add Boot Option", then
re-enable it when your done. Again this process varies a lot.
Generally on the boot tab you will find some way to add a new boot
option. After you find the button to to add a boot option, you
will be asked to select a partition. This is kind of cryptic as
well, and might take some guessing. Then you will be asked to
browse to a bootable EFI application, this will be
EFI/boot/bootx64.efi on your new fat32 partition. If you can't
browse to that path or you can't see the files that you put in
your fat32 partition under EFI/boot/, you probably picked the
wrong partition. After you have added your new boot option, move
that new boot option to the top of the boot order. Again, this
will vary with different UEFI implementations. Then save and
reboot.