Problems making dual boot Fedora/W10

Discussions in English on installing or upgrading Fedora
#1

I’m having problems making a dual-boot Fedora/W10 system. Not new to Linux, but I’m not a power user. Also can’t get WiFi to work, so if any solutions need software installed, I’ll need to overcome that first.

Burned Fedora to a thumb drive, made a disk partition, rebooted, and am trying to install (advanced custom storage config), and I get “‘error checking storage configuration”.

“‘failed to find a suitable stage 1 device: EFI system partition must be mounted on one of ‘boot/efi; EFI system partition cannot be of type None; EFI cannot be of type ntfs; EFI must be mounted on one of /boot/EFI; EFI system partition cannot be of type ntfs; EFI system partition must be mounted on one of ‘boot/EFI”

I’ve googled up the error and am just getting nowhere. Any help?

#2

Is there an existing EFI partition? (technically, an ESP — EFI system partition). Your windows installation should have created one, I believe. You should reuse the existing one (don’t delete or reformat) but configure it so that it is at the mount-point /boot/efi.

I found this article on opensource.com to be helpful in reminding myself of what the process looks like:

Is that helpful to you?

#3

That’s exactly what I need, but the instructions don’t help me. It’s just not explicit enough.

I next moved to install Linux. I started the process, and when it reached the disk configuration steps, I made sure not to change the Windows NTFS and MSR partitions. I also did not change the EPS, but I did set its mount point to /boot/efi . I then created the usual ext4 formatted partitions, / (root), /boot , and /home . The last partition I created was Linux swap .

I had thought Fedora might be more user-friendly, but I will probably just go with Mint; I’ve made dual-boot systems with Mint.

#4

It is pretty user-friendly, but partitioning can be complicated. It’s unfortunate that it’s a necessary first step. Have you tried using the non advanced custom partitioning?

#5

First you must make certain there is enough free space on the disk to install fedora. I assume the machine came with win10 on it, so go into the disk manager and shrink the ntfs drive to a smaller size.
My laptop had a 500Gb ssd so I chose to shrink the windows partition to 100G leaving me about 375G to install linux.
Once that is done then you can begin the install of fedora, but without that you can do nothing.

This is a very good tutorial on how to install fedora dual boot with windows. It says fedora 32 but will work with almost any version.

I have seen posts that say the automatic partitioning works, but also that it only creates /boot and / so it leaves you with /home as part of the system disk.
I always use custom partitioning and this is what works for me. I mount the existing efi partition at /boot/efi, create a new 500M /boot partition, create / as about 50G, and then use the rest of the space as /home. Do not format /boot/efi and do format everything else. If you are using LVM or BTRFS then /boot must be ext4 so the boot loader can read it.

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#6

2 posts were split to a new topic: Problems upgrading dual boot system

#7

I use Gparted to create a partition on my HDD and I create EFI partition by GParted and use the fat32 file system and after install win10, I installed Fedora and during installation, I mount EFI partition and continue the installation. and everything goes fun.

#8

The current defaults for desktop create separate boot partitions and then one btrfs partition within which / and /home are separate subvolume.

#9

The Fedora Workstation 33 USB boot media can do auto resize of Harddisk / SDD having active Windows installations.

I have done it to baremetals and inside VMs.

Just check the “reclaim” disk space option and everything works.

Only when it is not working, then we need to do partitioning manually.

For manually partitioning:

  1. If you are using Windows in UEFI boots already, you should have a UEFI (esp) partition in fat32 (or vfat) format. Locate that and set its mount point to /boot/efi. DO NOT format it, or it will make Windows failed to boot. Do not mix this with Windows Reserved Partition or Windows Recovery Partition.

  2. Create a 1GiB boot partition in ext4 format, and set mount point to /boot

  3. For the remain disk space, I will create a btrfs volume, then

  • create a subvol for /home
  • another subvole for /