Preparation for dual boot with WIN 10

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi all,

Let me first quickly give you some context, to understand where I am in the process of moving to openSUSE.

A couple of weeks ago, out of curiosity and because of not being happy with Windows behaviour on this “old” computer, I decided to try Linux again (after some disappointments many years ago). I installed VMWare on Windows 10 and tried out several distro’s as virtual machines: MX Linux, Manjaro, openSUSE Leap 15.1 and Tumbleweed,… After playing around with them, Manjaro didn’t work out, I seriously crippled the Tumbleweed installation (my bad!) and I did not really like the XFCE of MX Linux. openSUSE never disappointed: good ease of use, yast tool and I personally like the clean, professional look of KDE Plasma. I got Google drive working, chromium, video playback, LibreOffice works just fine for some basic home usage, in short openSUSE LEAP 15.1 it will be. Next step is to install a dual boot on this machine, and really start using Linux daily.

My hardware : ATI Radeon HD5700 1 Gb DDR5 , AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz, 8 Gb Ram, connected to wired LAN network, 1 Tb hard disk (400Gb Free), BENQ screen 1920x1080.

Current partitions :

  1. 100 MB NTFS (53% free)
  2. 930 GB NTFS (47% free) – the windows C: => reduce by 330 GB ??
  3. 850 MB Repair Partitions (100% free) => delete ??

What I want to do :

  1. 100 MB NTFS (53% free)
  2. 600 GB NTFS (500 used, so 100 GB free) – the windows C:
  3. create / in ext4 30 Gb
  4. create /home ext4 284 Gb
  5. create swap 16 Gb

My questions:

  1. do I resize with windows disk partitioner or during the openSUSE install?
  2. I still don’t understand the warnings and issues in other posts around EFI / BIOS / MBR ? What do I need to do to succesfully install the GRUB2 bootloader?
  3. Is it safe to delete the windows repair partition ? (because I want to have my swap at the end of the disk)
  4. any other suggestions or remarks to my proposed partitions?

Cheers!
J

2

Disable the windows fastboot option in Windows10

3

Also:
Clear all the stale restore points to free up disk space.
Disable swap.
Disable hibernation.
Use Windows own resizer to reduce the size of C:

Doing all the above you might wind up with half or more of C: being freespace.

4

This is very dangerous, especially with a small RAM 8 GB.

To OP:
You can upgrade your system with Phenom II X6 + add RAM + SSD drive for a system partition.
SSD Samsung 860 Evo is incompatible with your system.
Maybe swap 16 GB is too big.

5

That advice, as given above, is only valid for Windows during the shrinking of the Windows partition. After that it is to be switched on in Windows again.

6

I have no idea why you think no swap is dangerous or 8GB is small. No swap is certainly not a problem for the temporary purpose of maximizing freespace prior to a system partition shrink operation, unless you’re trying to run a whole fleet of bloated programs during the shrink, which is a terrible idea.

7

Thanks, I disabled it.

8

Thanks, I will run CCleaner once more and delete those restore points. I’ll deactivate the swap during resize and re-enable after shrinking.

9

On the Linux setup, I see no comments, unless that 16Gb might be too big?

And can I delete the windows repair partition safely?

10

Regards

susejunky

11

Nice reading! I downloaded the EaseUS Partition Master tool, and this disk is not empty, so I decided to only shrink a bit and move it.