Guidance for win8/openSUSE dual boot on Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

The 9 Lite (915S3G-K01US) has a 128 GB SSD, Quad-core AMD processor, Radeon HD 8250 GPU and Windows 8. I have updated the firmware through a Samsung program, but there was no info on what it was for (hopefully their UEFI issues). Their UEFI interface is very basic and does not have much in the way of options.

First question is if there is any info on if this model is even affected by the UEFI issues that other models have. I did a search but could only find installation info on other models. (Like this one: 482973-these-correct-steps-install-opensuse-12-2-my-uefi-laptop.html)

My first thought was to wipe win8 completely but there are a bunch of partitions on here that I am hesitant to remove; 400MB win recovery, 300MB EFI partiton and a 1GB Samsung Recovery. Should I leave those partitions and just overwrite the win8 partition? Keep just the EFI partition? Wipe the whole thing?

Does anyone know how picky is win8 about being cloned, so that if I clone the drive and have issues installing I can then just restore the whole thing? M$ forums are a joke so I’ve given up getting a useful answer from them.

I’ve seen a few posts suggesting using CSM mode for openSUSE. Does this make install harder on a UEFI system? Are there special steps that need to be taken to do this? Is it even really necessary since supposedly the newer kernels are supposed to circumvent the Samsung bricking issue?

Any input would be appreciated since I am very new to this and don’t want to mess up the computer.

#2

So I recently purchased a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Windows 8 and a 128 GB SSD. I can say that there is just not enough room to dual boot on a 128 GB SSD without reloading Windows to only two partitions. I called up Dell and got them to send me a boot OEM Windows thumb drive disk and I bought a larger SSD disk. While waiting for new stuff to arrive, I loaded openSUSE 12.3 on an external USB hard drive which did work. You could also give a LiveDVD or LiveUSB a try to make sure openSUSE works. I later installed the new SSD drive, created a MBR SSD boot disk and now dual boot between Windows 8.1 and openSUSE 12.3. To use a 128 GB SSD disk, you must reload Windows 8 and do not use an EFI boot setup. For disk type info, read here:

Creating Partitions During Install for MBR and GPT Hard Disks - Blogs - openSUSE Forums

Thank You,

#3

To clarify, I have a 12.3 USB stick (maybe a liveCD size-wise, very small) that I can get into just fine. It doesn’t recognize the sound and won’t let me update the system, but it is a very old USB stick so will try with something bigger/newer and see if it functions better.

Pressing F10 right at startup has let me choose boot options [currently USB/Win 8]. F2 at startup gets me into the UEFI which will let me choose between UEFI, UEFI AND CSM or just CSM. If in CSM it can’t see win8 but can still see the 12.3 USB.

I don’t plan on using windows often if I do have to keep it, so it won’t get any bigger than the 55GB it’s reserved. For openSUSE I won’t have much installed; libre writer, pithos, gimp and a couple of plasmoids for KDE. I’d love to have a bigger SSD but I’m not sure I can remove the one that’s in here. I couldn’t figure out how to get the back off.

Why exactly do you say this? Do you mean to use legacy mode would require reinstalling win8?

Thanks for replying.:slight_smile:

#4

On my Dell, four partitions were in use, Windows boot, Windows Main, restore partition and one more I did not understand. On a 128 GB SSD, you can’t make that work unless UEFI configured and in general, Windows 8 will not want to work with less than 80 GB. It is my opinion 128 GB is not big enough for a Windows 8 and openSUSE dual boot setup. So, you reformat SSD and get rid of Windows or get a larger SSD and go with MBR for dual boot. What ever you do, try to get an external reloadable media for Windows 8.

Thank You,

#5

Thank you for explaining. I would like to get rid of win8 completely but only hesitate because of the recovery partitions. On the other hand I can still return it if something happens to make it unbootable. Of course all my other questions are as yet unanswered. Seems I might have to just hope for the best and go for it. :\

#6

I had issues getting Windows 8 to work on a 128 SSD where I had only two partitions and one was the very small boot partition. So Windows 8 min partition size is one problem and I can say that openSUSE will under most situations, will work fine on 128 GB SSD. Second, while you can, get the Laptop manufacture to send you externally re-loadable boot media for Windows 8 so you do not lose that option. You paid for Windows 8, so I would not throw that option away.

Thank You,

#7

Here’s another one of those how-to-s: https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/how-faq-forums/unreviewed-how-faq/487837-how-dual-boot-preinstalled-windows-8-linux-uefi-etc.html. But I do not know your computer in detail. As you see (if you read it), the Asus I used when writing, didn’t give any problems at all. I have later tried to install on another one, a Toshiba Satellite P50A (https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/490605-toshiba-satellite-p50-uefi-w8-dualboot-cannot-install-12-3-nor-13-1-beta.html), which didn’t work out that well. I guess you have to try for yourself and see how it works out. You may also want to consider to wait for the release of 13.1, as I expect that one to work better (although the RC1 presently available doesn’t seem to perform/install as well as 12.3 at the moment when it comes to UEFI variations).

If you want to use W8 for something, you need to keep it. And you will probably want to keep many of the “W8” partitions too. It seems that the scheme is MS provides two recovery partitions, one EFI partition, one 128MB reserved partition (needed), W8 system partition and then one or more partition for use as the vendor sees fit. You want to keep the smaller recovery partition (it is normally the first of the recovery partitions), and you remove the second one (if you need the space) only after creating a recovery-disk in the form of a bootable USB-stick (see my how-to above for an example of how to do that). You can shrink the W8 system partition (the one you boot from in the end) to almost nothing, but you should at all times have 14% free space of your final disk size for W8 not to slow down. Add to that what you want for yourself (and your programs) AND 1-2GB extra to allow for W8 auto updates, then you get at a reasonable disk size for W8 to use. The remaining can be used for OpenSUSE.

If you go here (https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/install-boot-login/490605-toshiba-satellite-p50-uefi-w8-dualboot-cannot-install-12-3-nor-13-1-beta-5.html#42, you can also look at posting #40 of that link), you can see how my Toshiba performed when doing that. W8 was happy with it, but it changed the LAN adapter environment for OpenSUSE so that it didn’t work afterwards. While I didn’t restore my clone of the entire HDD, it did reset it factory setting by using the rescue USB-stick produced - and that worked. I cannot see why a restore of the entire disk shouldn’t work. Note though, that a restore will change/reset the EFI partition too (of course) and on my Toshiba, I had to enter the BIOS and simulate a change and save it for it to pick up the new content of the EFI partition before I could proceed further.

I’ve learned more of UEFI/GPT et al since writing the how-to, and that doesn’t tell me to recommend mixing the two. I would go for UEFI/GPT as much as you can, as that will be the future. However, as long as your disks are less than 2TB in size, you do not need GPT, but can do with MBR. The big upside with GPT though, is the many partitions you can make use of. That will make handling dual-booting easier. I also recommend going for a single EFI partition (at least per disk), but make backups of it as you make changes. Those backups have saved me several times when experimenting!
As for the bricking issue, if your Samsung is of a new date, Samsung should have released a BIOS update to fix this according to Booting Linux via UEFI can ‘brick’ some Samsung laptops | PCWorld (the article is from Jan 2013). However, you will probably want to see this too: Not just Linux: Windows can ‘brick’ Samsung laptops too | PCWorld.
It seems that W8 can have the same problems as Linux in these areas, and that means the Samsung bricking problem isn’t Linux specific.
BTW: I think it is possible to brick any PC by misbehaving using bcdedit and its functional cousins. W8 gives some protection against such activity when Secure Boot is activated - and it will make use of the first recovery partition in order to rectify that. So - if nothing else, that is one argument to use Secure Boot ;). And: Keep the first W8 recovery partition live and sound on your disk at all times ;).

Good luck in your endavour!

dayfinger

#8

Thanks for the reply dayfinger. Some very useful information there that will come in handy.

So after doing more research and thinking on it my current hope is to clone the whole drive, attempt install of 12.3 on its own partition and test it out. If it works as hoped I will keep it as dual boot for a while (to make sure it continues to work) with the plan of taking off win8 but leaving the recovery partitions and EFI partition. If it still works then yay. If not then use the clone/recovery media from Samsung that jdmcdaniel3 suggested I get.

Still welcome any input anyone has to offer on this, and thank you to jdmcdaniel3 and dayfinger for your quick replies.

#9

On Mon 21 Oct 2013 11:06:02 PM CDT, ytsedragyn wrote:

Thanks for the reply dayfinger. Some very useful information there that
will come in handy.

So after doing more research and thinking on it my current hope is to
clone the whole drive, attempt install of 12.3 on its own partition and
test it out. If it works as hoped I will keep it as dual boot for a
while (to make sure it continues to work) with the plan of taking off
win8 but leaving the recovery partitions and EFI partition. If it still
works then yay. If not then use the clone/recovery media from Samsung
that jdmcdaniel3 suggested I get.

Still welcome any input anyone has to offer on this, and thank you to
jdmcdaniel3 and dayfinger for your quick replies.

Hi
On my HP 2000 Notebook, I just pulled the drive and replaced it. Then
used dd to put the winre and recovery partitions onto a different
drive. I’ve since dumped win8 from that system, it just runs
openSUSE…

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° SUSE Knowledge Partner (Linux Counter #276890)
SLED 11 SP3 (x86_64) GNOME 2.28.0 Kernel 3.0.93-0.8-default
If you find this post helpful and are logged into the web interface,
please show your appreciation and click on the star below… Thanks!

#10

That’s a Kabini part … the gpu in this apu uses the GCN architecture (a.k.a. Southern Islands) … under 12.3, out of the box graphics performance will be very painful … you can upgrade the graphics stack, and it should work then. The good news is that under the forthcoming 13.1 release, the adapter should work OOTB.

#11

dayfinger wrote:

> You can shrink the W8
> system partition (the one you boot from in the end) to almost nothing,
> but you should at all times have 14% free space of your final disk size
> for W8 not to slow down. Add to that what you want for yourself (and
> your programs) AND 1-2GB extra to allow for W8 auto updates, then you
> get at a reasonable disk size for W8 to use. The remaining can be used
> for OpenSUSE.

Trying to update W8->8.1 here, the MS site would not even begin the upgrade
download (3.5Gb d/l) w/o a minimum of 20 Gb free disk space on the W*
partition. Fair warning: expanding/moving partitions around on a 2Tb drive
can be a trying experience, to say the least, so crank that into your disk
planning if you intend to keep W8 reasonably current for any length of time.

–
Will Honea

#12

I’m putting that off for a few days. Let us know how it goes.

#13

Well here is an update. Used dd to make an image for a just-in-case scenario then did an install into a chunk of 32GB space I’d made to test if I could even get it to load. Used the EFI partition for boot without secureboot or fastboot. Install went fine and at restart I went into the UEFI to check the boot order and OpenSUSE was even listed first! (So sooooo much easier than the nightmare I had installing 12.3 on a win8 HP laptop…) Haven’t tried logging into win8 yet.

Video is passable at the moment but I can’t dim the display which is annoying. I am hoping that using the AMD driver would fix this? or is there a passable one available that I need to find? Any input you’d have Tyler_K would be most welcome!

Having an issue with the touchpad, as in it isn’t recognized at all. It’s an elantech or something but I saw somewhere that the synaptic driver might work so I might try that. Had a bit of tweaking to get the bluetooth to recognize a bluetooth radio and the usual lack of wireless on first restart but both are working fine now.

The win partition has about 25GB free at the moment but I don’t see myself upgrading to 8.1 any time soon since I will rarely use windows. If I don’t use it in the next few weeks it might vanish completely. It’s mostly a security blanket at the moment as I haven’t ever had a computer without windows on it.

I do have another ntfs partition for user files and such that I would like to make openSUSE automount but I haven’t found out how to do that as yet.

A minor set of setbackes when you consider I was terrified of breaking the computer completely. :wink: Thank you everyone for your responses!

#14

My comments above were strictly in regards to the OSS driver stack. I was just focused on that aspect for whatever reason and failed to take into consideration installation of the proprietary catylst/fglrx stack. The prop. AMD drivers should support the adapter (I say should because I don’t know that for a fact, but suspect that it would be the case with a recent release of the prop drivers). In general, the prop. drivers currently give much better experience for AMD adapters using GCN/SI (and newer) gpu architecture … particularly w.r.t. 3D/OpenGL performance.

So, if I were to re-summarize, I’d say:

  • on openSUSE 12.3, the out of the box installation is going to provide for a very poor graphics experience. This is because you’d be using the OSS stack, and, OOTB, its severely lacking in respect to support for SI class hardware … hence, you’d be highly advised to update the OSS graphics stack (via the appropriate repos) and the kernel as well (to get the updated radeon DRM driver), in order to get a satisfactory graphics experience with an SI adapter being driven by the OSS drivers … or, you could switch to the prop. drivers instead
  • on openSUSE 13.1, the OOTB installation *should *
    provide a satisfactory graphics experience with an SI adapter being driven by the OSS drivers … or, you could switch to the prop. drivers instead
#15

nrickert wrote:

>
> Will Honea;2592726 Wrote:
>> Trying to update W8->8.1 here, the MS site would not even begin the
>> upgrade download (3.5Gb d/l) w/o a minimum of 20 Gb free disk space on
>> the W* partition.
>
> I’m putting that off for a few days. Let us know how it goes.
>

Interim report.

Played 52-pickup with the disk arrangement. Since I had a pretty big chunk
of unused space near the end of the disk, I first resized/moved the two
existing oS installations to gain enough room to expand the W8 partition
plus adding a third oS installation for throwaway use. Gotta love these 2Tb
drives! To keep things usable, I resized then moved the partitions from one
oS installation at a time then rebooted to the one not yet touched to make
sure the access was still there. Time consuming, but it beat the heck out
of some wierd recovery effort later. I used gparted to resize the Linux
partitions and it worked without a hitch but moving partitions such that the
result overlaps the original space can be VERY slow…

Once I had everything, including the swap partition, moved to clear enough
space to allow W8 to expand as needed, I booted Windows and let it expand
itself by 30Gb. One caution - free enough space to expand Windows then
leave an extra 10-12Gb above that. The expansion or update will want to
create a recovery partition during the update.

Now the fun began. The update wiped all openSUSE entries in the BIOS boot
table - only Win8.1 was left. Rather than trying to put my fat fingers into
the efi boot tables, I simply ran a basic install of 13.1 to the space I had
left free. That recreated the boot entries for the Linux partitions and was
probably faster than a manual recovery. After installing a clean copy of
13.1, all was well.

Since everything was working, I also used Win8.1 to install a BIOS update
from HP. That wiped the boot tables again but a quick reinstall of the 13.1
test partitions fixed that - again. Few people will got through this since
BIOS updates are fairly rare, but consider it. I should have done that as
soon as I did the Win 8.1 update; that would have bypassed one 13.1
installation.

Since I had everything working, I decided to try an update of the backup
12.3 installation to 13.1. That produced an interesting result: the updated
installation would not boot - couldn’t find a kernel to boot. The new 13.1
installation still booted, the existing 12.3 and W8.1 all both booted OK.
After booting those, I changed the boot order for the grub menu to make 12,3
the default using the clean 13.1 system. After that clean system rewrote
the efi boot tables, the udated 12.3-13.1 system decided to boot - but it
had a wierd entry in the grub menu. It identified the updated 12.3 system
with some long string about the deprecated suse-release file, but the sytem
now booted. After a couple more reboots, that wierd string disappeared and
a proper entry suddenly appeared - don’t ask me how as I have no idea.

Summary: updating Win8->8.1 will probably hose your efi boot table. Before
you start, make sure you have at least 20 Gb free for the W8 system.
gparted worked just fine for moving disk partitions around and GPT keeps the
original partition numbers so you don’t need to worry about changing the
partition order as you do with MBR disks. Having room to do a clean install
of Linux is a simple way of fixing any efi boot issues.

–
Will Honea

#16

With respect , my experience is different.

While my Ultrabook has 256GB SD drive, I did reduce windows-8 to the following:

  • sda1 - 450MB partition - NTFS (system for ?? functionality)
  • sda2 - 260MB partition - FAT (EFI partition)
  • sda3 - 128MB partition - NTFS (labelled Microsoft for ?? functionality)
  • sda4 - 63.6GB partition - NTFS - main ‘c’ drive for windows8
  • sda6 - 9 GB partition - NTFS - this is a recovery partition for windows8

The remainder of the partitions (not listed above) are for GNU/Linux.

Windows 8 runs fine with 63.6 GB. I don’t use windows8 much but I did do some minimal testing.

If one has sufficient external backup DVDs and/or USB sticks with windows8, then one may be willing to remove the 9GB recovery partition.

I do agree whole heartedly that if one is to be a nominal Windows8 user, then one would want the sort of space that you note (~80GB or more) but for occasional use, I think one can go down to 65GB or so and windows8 with a number of applications will run fine.

#17

Let me say that a 256 GB SSD is large enough to dual boot Windows 8 and openSUSE 12.3 and second if you run Windows 8 long enough with only 63.6 GB, you will find that its not enough. Like many things making some system changes (like Windows 8 default cache size) and holding back on adding in free software from the store not needed, you can help Windows 8 last longer on less. openSUSE is more frugal on disk space usage and using the Windows partition for multimedia files allows the Windows partition to be larger.

Thank You,

#18

So far things are still okay except the touchpad… I can not get it recognized as a touchpad which is seriously frustrating. Have yet to get the AMD driver installed, last time I did it it was a bit of an adventure, I hope this time it is a little easier.

If anyone has a suggestion for getting the touchpad working I would be very grateful.

#19

nrickert wrote:

>
> Will Honea;2592726 Wrote:
>> Trying to update W8->8.1 here, the MS site would not even begin the
>> upgrade download (3.5Gb d/l) w/o a minimum of 20 Gb free disk space on
>> the W* partition.
>
> I’m putting that off for a few days. Let us know how it goes.
>

Additional obsevations. I tried installing 13.1 with the existing 12.3
/home. That duplicated several small issues I had seen with the attempt to
do a straight update on the 12.3 system.

  1. The most annoying one was that the time zone and clock setting were not
    changed to what I had selected during the install - nor were the old values
    used. That has been a consistent PITA on every installation.

  2. Network settings were also all screwed up. I essentially had to go
    through the whole network setup manually to get a connection on either wired
    or wireless.

  3. This looks like an intentional change, but I see no way to set up sshd to
    monitor a high port. The YAST module for sshd is gone and that’s one I
    actually need.

–
Will Honea

#20

Samsung’s Ativ Book 9 Lite was launched in the UK earlier this month and is the less powerful but more portable model in the Ativ Book series. Running Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system (OS), the Ativ Book 9 Lite also has a solid-state disk (SSD) drive for quick boot times and a touchscreen for those rare times when you actually want to use the Windows metro user interface.