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This article is about how to use UEFI to launch Windows and Linux. The editor thinks it is very practical, so share it with you as a reference and follow the editor to have a look.

This is a quick explanation for setting up Linux and Windows dual booting on the same machine, using the Unified Extensible firmware Interface (UEFI).

I will highlight some important points rather than step-by-step instructions on how to configure your system to achieve dual booting. As an example, I will mention the new laptop I bought a few months ago. I first installed Ubuntu Linux on the entire hard drive, which destroyed the pre-installed Windows 10 environment. A few months later, I decided to install a different Linux distribution, Fedora Linux, and to install Windows 10 again with it in a dual startup configuration. I will emphasize some extremely important practical situations. Let's get started!

Firmware

Dual booting is not just a software issue. Or it's a software problem, because it needs to change your firmware to tell your machine how to start the program. Here are some important things to keep in mind about firmware.

UEFI vs BIOS

Before attempting to install, make sure your firmware configuration is optimal. Most computers sold today have a new type of firmware called Unified Extensible firmware Interface Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). UEFI has almost replaced another type of firmware called basic input and output system Basic Input Output System (BIOS). (many people, including many firmware vendors), often call BIOS the traditional boot mode Legacy Boot.

I don't need BIOS, so I chose UEFI mode.

Safe start

Another important setting is to start Secure Boot safely. This feature will detect whether the startup path has been tampered with and prevent the startup of unauthorized operating systems. Now, I disable this option to make sure I can install Fedora Linux. According to the introduction of the Wikipedia "Features / secure Startup" section of the Fedora project, Fedora Linux also works when the secure startup option is enabled. This may be different for other Linux distributions-I intend to revisit this setting in the future.

In short, if you find that you cannot install your Linux operating system when this setting is enabled, disable secure boot and try the installation again.

Partition the boot drive

If you choose dual boot and both operating systems are on the same drive, you must divide it into multiple partitions. Even if you use two different drives for dual boot, most Linux environments are best divided into several basic partitions for a variety of reasons. Here are some options to consider.

GPT vs MBR

If you decide to partition your boot drive manually, I recommend using the GUID partition table GUID Partition Table (GPT) instead of the old master boot record Master Boot Record (MBR) before doing it. One of the reasons for this change is that MBR has two specific restrictions, while GPT does not:

MBR can have up to 15 partitions, while GPT can have up to 128 partitions.

MBR supports up to 2 TB disks, while GPT uses 64-bit addresses, which makes it support up to 8 million TB disks.

If you have purchased a hard drive recently, you may know that many modern hard drives exceed the 2 TB limit.

EFI system partition

If you are doing a new installation or using a new drive, there may be no partition to start. In this case, the operating system installer will first create a partition, the EFI system partition EFI System Partition (ESP). If you choose to use a tool such as gdisk to partition your drive manually, you will need to use some parameters to create the partition. Based on the existing ESP, I set it to a size of about 500 MB and assigned it to the ef00 (EFI system) partition type. The UEFI specification requires that it be formatted as FAT32/msdos, probably because it is supported by a large number of operating systems.

Zoning

Operating system installation

After you have completed the previous two tasks, you can install your operating system. Although I focus on Windows 10 and Fedora Linux here, the process is very similar when installing other combinations.

Windows 10

I started the installation of Windows 10 and created a 20 GB Windows partition. Because I previously installed Linux on my laptop, the drive already has an ESP, and I choose to keep it. I delete all existing Linux and swap partitions to start a new installation, and then start my Windows installation. The Windows installer automatically creates another small 16-MB partition called Microsoft reserved partition Microsoft Reserved Partition (MSR). After this is done, there is still about 400 GB of unallocated space on the 512 GB boot drive.

Next, I continued to complete the Windows 10 installation process. Then I rebooted to Windows to make sure it worked, creating my user account, setting up Wi-Fi, and completing other necessary tasks when the operating system first started.

Fedora Linux

Next, I turned my mind to installing Linux. I started the installation process, and when the installation went through the steps of disk configuration, I made sure that the Windows NTFS and MSR partitions were not changed. I won't change ESP either, but I'll set its mount point to / boot/efi. Then I create the usual ext4 format partitions, / (root partition), / boot, and / home. The last partition I created was the swap partition (swap) of Linux.

Just like installing Windows, I continued to complete the Linux installation and then restarted. To my delight, the unified boot loader GRand Unified Boot Loader (GRUB) menu provides the option to choose Windows or Linux at startup, which means I don't need to do any additional configuration. I chose Linux and completed general steps such as creating my user account.

Thank you for reading! This is the end of this article on "how to use UEFI dual startup Windows and Linux". I hope the above content can be of some help to you, so that you can learn more knowledge. if you think the article is good, you can share it out for more people to see!

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