Dual Boot Question

Support
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1

Hi! My name is Mihir Garg. I desperately want to switch to linux, but I believe I am doing something wrong while installing.

What I do:

  1. Edit UEFI Bios Settings: Safe Boot to Off
  2. Load the USB, spam press FN F2 ( Legion computers are weird this way )
  3. Go through the setup process, selecting windows installation with linux.
  4. Boot

During Step 4, the terminal freezes, and artifacts. After this, I hold down my power button, and reboot. I enter BIOS, and select windows boot launcher. Often times while doing this, my computer bootloops and says something on the lines of no boot launcher found. This is resolved by powering down, restarting, entering BIOS, and selecting windows boot launcher. Later on, I use this guide askubuntucom/questions/429610/uninstall-grub-and-use-windows-bootloader to remove the ubuntu bootloader ( I used ubuntu to try linux at first). This guide stoped my bootlooping and any other terminal issues, like being stuck in the GRUB GNU terminal.

I tried many linux distros, like linux mint, manjaro, ubuntu, redhat and all the normal distros, but I always got the same results. I updated my BIOS ( LENOVO BHCN41WW, 11/30/2020 ) and there have been no more BIOS updates since then. I have an SSD with 500GB with windows installed. I also have a hard disk with 1tb of space. The hard disk is where I attempted to place my linux installation.

My question: Since I have an external hard disk, and I selected manjaro instalation along with windows instalation, could that be causing the issue because the windows bootloader is on the SSD and not the hard disk?

As you can see by my updated BIOS date, I have been trying to get linux on my laptop for a while, secure boot is off, but no mater what, I cannot get it to work. Any help whatsoever helps! Thanks!

2

Seems to be something with the partitioning, best would be to post your partition setup.

Could be many things including uefi vs legacy or conflicting mode installation (better use uefi). Here some infos:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_boot_process

You can chroot into manjaro using your live usb then using the terminal to get the relevant outputs.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/chroot

Give output using the terminal and post here:

 lsblk

https://man.archlinux.org/man/lsblk.8.en

Edit: sorry you are having such troubles, hopefully the links are not too confusing but it is worth spending the reading time to troubleshoot this step by step.

I don’t think so. As long as you have an efi partition and grub bootloader is installed it should be recognized. Assuming your system is partitioned adequately, e.g. not mixing uefi and legacy or mbr vs gpt partition tables…

3

Thanks! Should I try to use legacy or uefi? And should I still use with windows option?

4

If your windows is installed via uefi then uefi rather than legacy. Also make sure the live usb was made for uefi not legacy. Not sure how to check this but it resulted in linux boot problems in the past on some of my rigs and I spent hours trying to figure out what was going on…

Edit: make sure to backup your work from the windows install before testing system settings like that…

5

So when look at system information, the boot type is UEFI. Are you saying I should try legacy manjaro?

6

No, I would not. If you can run windows using uefi also make a live usb for manjaro on that system and run in uefi.

Can you please post your partitioning table, boot via live usb open terminal and post:
sudo fdisk -l

7

Sure thing! Its gona take me like a day bc of school, but will do.

8

Best would be for you to follow this tutorial, that should help partitioning things correctly and might be easiest. My understanding is that you use uefi and win 10.