Dual boot on a SSD

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My old LG laptop was unusable for my work. Random shutdowns and overheating were some of the problems.

As I work with Machine Learning, I needed a computer with a powerful GPU, so I bought a gamer laptop: an MSI GE72-2QE Apache.

It came with Windows 8.1, which I wanted to keep for some image editing software and gaming. However, I use Linux for programming, so my task was clear:

I needed Dual Boot with Ubuntu + Windows 8.1.

Then my nightmare started.

After lots of hours lost and many problems, I achieved my goal. I’ll not tell much more about what I did wrong, but I’ll keep a record of what did work. I’m not sure whether everything here is necessary, but after I succeeded I didn’t retry to find the minimal number of steps. Maybe next time.

Creating a bootable USB device

YUMI didn’t work for me, nor did any other Windows software, so I had to find another way.

The solution was to use USB Image Writer, available in Linux Mint by default. It happens that a friend uses Mint, so I created the bootable pendrive with his help.

Windows 8.1 setup

Here I just disabled Fast Startup.

To do so, we need to access the power options: just click the battery icon on the tray and select “Choose what the power buttons do” on the left. On the new screen we have the option to disable Fast Startup under “Shutdown settings”.

BIOS setup

To access the BIOS, we can press the DELETE key on startup, but we need to do this quickly, before giving it time to enter Windows.

An alternative is to hold SHIFT before clicking the restart option in Windows. It’ll open a screen with some options and we need to select “Troubleshoot > Advanced options > UEFI Firmware settings”.

Once in the BIOS screen, we need to set the following:

  • Secure Boot: Disable
  • Fast Boot: Disable
  • Boot mode select: LEGACY
  • Change boot order: select your USB drive

Installing Ubuntu

With the bootable pendrive inserted, restart the computer and keep pressing F10. Then select your USB device from the list that will show up.

Choose your installation options as usual and do a manual installation. This is important, as otherwise you could erase your Windows installation.

When selecting the partitions, I chose to boot Ubuntu from the SSD, but as it’s a relatively small unit with only 128 GB, I decided to put only the /root and the /boot partitions on it. On the HDD I put /home and /var/lib/docker, as I use Docker and it can consume a lot of storage for containers and images.

Putting everything together, this was my setup:

  • /root: 25 GB on SSD.
  • /boot: 256 MB on SSD.
  • /home: 92 GB on HDD.
  • /var/lib/docker: 46 GB on HDD

Fixing GRUB

After installing Ubuntu, I couldn’t access Windows anymore, as the boot loader got messed up. I used the great Boot-Repair tool to fix it. If you can’t access your Ubuntu installation, just use the live option on the installation pendrive.

Open a terminal and run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

After rebooting you should be able to choose your OS from GRUB’s list.

Fixing the SteelSeries Engine keyboard

The last problem I had was that the keyboard customization stopped working after all this process. The solution was to update the BIOS and reinstall the keyboard driver.

I downloaded the BIOS software from here.

To reinstall the driver I just uninstalled the old one in Device Manager and rebooted the machine to let it auto-install the driver.