Dualboot on Lenovo B570 - 3: Partitioning and installing

The Lenovo laptop uses already all 4 available primary partitions of the harddisk, so there is no place to install Linux. Fortunally one of the 4 used partitions is an extended partition which can hold as many logical partitions as you want.

To shrink the large partition holding the windows C: drive I first defragmented the harddrive from within Windows 7 and then used the Windows Disk Manager to shrink it. It let me shrink the partition only to 280GB for some reason, but that's totally enough and I always can access the space on this partition from Linux, too.

After shrinking the large partition I resized the extended partition to use the now available free space (otherwise the installers of Fedora and Ubuntu will complain that they cannot generate partitions!).

From here on the installers of Fedora and Ubuntu can handle the rest of the partitioning. Make sure you have a wired connection to the internet if you want to run updates during installation (because wireless needs some manual help - see part 4 of this post series).

Reboot and select Fedora or Ubuntu from the Linux submenu of the XBoot boot screen. During installation select custom layout for your partitions and generate a layout similar to this for each of the Linux installations:

1. a boot partition of 100-500MB mounted at /boot and formatted ext2
2. a root partition of 10-20GB mounted at / and formatted ext4
3. a home partition of 10-20GB mounted at /home and formatted ext4
4. a swap partition of 4-16GB (twice your RAM) formatted as swap

For my laptop I want to handle the initial bootloading by the windows bootloader. So I selected not to install any linux bootloader to the MBR of the harddisk, but to their own boot partition.

Since the swap partition is used for hibernate each linux installation requires its own swap partition. After installation make sure that in /etc/fstab is just ONE swap partition per installation enabled (of course a different one as in the other installation!).

After both installers had run I booted back into Windows 7 and used EasyBCD to add an bootloader menu entry for Fedora and Ubuntu.

It wasn't that complicated. But wait: there is still something missing. Wireless LAN is not working in both linux installations.

Dualboot on Lenovo B570 - 2: Backup

Before manipulating disk partitions a backup is always recommended. On my Lenovo laptop there are in general three options to make a backup:

1. the Windows 7 backup functionality
2. the Lenovo Onekey Rescue-System
3. Clonezilla-LiveCD on the USB-Stick prepared previously (the first posting)

To be honest: I hate proprietary software. You never know what the software is doing and which strange file formats they are using. When it comes down to harddisk/partition backups nothing compares to a simple sector-by-sector image of the content.  With a tool like Clonezilla you'll get exactly that: a plain copy of the content, which can be easily restored or cloned to another harddisk or even loop mounted to extract just portions of it (if you know how to, of course).


It's a shame that Clonezilla still comes without a modern GUI, but well, it's the best option to make a backup, so who cares?

Before booting from the USB stick containing the Clonezilla-LiveCD enter the BIOS (press F2 while booting) and modify the boot sequence (first device should be the USB stick). And while in the BIOS enable the Virtualization Support, too, if you want to use VirtualBox or KVM later. I really don't understand why this feature is disabled by default on almost every laptop.

After booting fron the USB stick the Clonezilla boot option can be found in the utils section of the XBoot boot menu (if you haven't forget to download it and install it with XBoot, of course).

Since there is not much data on the disk (just the configurated windows including a few tools) I've chosen a full harddisk backup including the verify after backup option and let it backup the harddisk content to an external USB harddisk. I don't know if Clonezilla supports eSATA yet, but it will be the better option due to the faster disk access.

After half an hour the backup is done. Enjoy a few chapters of a good book inbetween.  

Dualboot on Lenovo B570 - 1: Prerequisites

In this multi-post series I'll will document the setup of a dualboot laptop.

Well, dualboot isn't totally correct (just for Dr. Google) - it should read tripleboot, because in the end it will run three mainstream operating systems side by side:

• Windows 7
• Ubuntu 11.04
• Fedora 15

 Hardware used:

• Lenovo B570 Laptop (i5 / 4GB RAM / 640GB HDD)
• Transcend Ultraspeed 8GB USB-Stick
• external 640 GB USB-Disk for Backup

Step 1: Windows 7 - Setup

Nothing special here. After turning on the laptop for the first time the Windows 7 installation starts and guides you through all necessary steps.


Additionally software installed (required for next steps):

• md5 checksum Tool for Windows
  nice drag & drop md5 checksum calculator (just put the executable directly on the desktop)
• XBoot (Multiple LiveISOs on USB-Stick)
• .NET-Framework v4 (required by XBoot)
• EasyBCD (Windows Bootloader Config Tool) 

For my personal minimum setup I installed also (not required):

• VirtualBox (let you setup and run virtual machine easily)
• Java JDK 1.7
• MineCraft (I'm actually addicted to this game)
• Mozilla Firefox Browser
  ... because Chrome-Browser has no master password!

Step 2: Preparing the USB-Stick for Multiboot

1. Format the USB-Stick with FAT32
2. Start XBoot and select Downloads from menu which gives you a list of supported LiveISOs and where you can download them.
3. For my setup I downloaded:
   
   • Fedora 15 64-bit ISO (necessary)
   • Ubuntu 11.4 64-bit ISO (necessary)
   • GParted ISO - for partition manipulations (necessary)
   • Clonezilla - for partition and/or complete harddisk backup (necessary)
   • SystemRescue ISO - various tools (optional)
   • Ultimate Boot CD - another set of tools (optional)
   • Partition Magic ISO - another partitions manipulation distro (optional)
4. After downloading close the download site selection menu and drag & drop the ISOs to the main window of XBoot. They should get automatically recognized. By double clicking on the the names (first column) used by XBoot you can edit them. To recognize the versions later I added at least version numbers including a 64 bit hint to the names.
5. Press the button to write the stuff to the USB stick, select the correct stick and let it finish. 

Note, that XBoot is not able to modify any previous installation on a stick, nor is it able to write its configuration somewhere for later reuse. Make sure everything is setup correct BEFORE writing to the stick. Otherwise restart with formatting the stick with FAT32.

If you want to use the built-in QEMU-Simulation to test the stick, you must start XBoot first as admin (right-click + run as admin).