Re: Win7 Recovery partition

[Chris Murphy]

On May 28, 2013, at 1:28 PM, Tom Davies <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> 
> My 'worry' is that after installing Gnu&Linux she will never be able to use 
> Win8 again (or more to the point i wont be able to mess around with Win8 and 
> explore in order to see just how troublesome it is).  I get the feeling she 
> would quite happily lose Win8 even if it meant replacing with something 
> better, such as Vista or DVL.  
> 
> Does Gnu&Linux boot-up when fully installed and Uefi on?

You need to find a distribution that's supporting UEFI boot natively, without 
disabling it. The one installer I've used (Fedora/Red Hat's anaconda) produces 
a UEFI installation if the computer booted the install media in UEFI mode; and 
produces a BIOS installation if the computer booted the install media in BIOS 
mode.

BIOS uses a completely different method of booting than UEFI. So you can't just 
switch the UEFI on/off and expect a previously installed system to work, it 
simply won't. The bootloaders are different, the partition scheme is different, 
it's all pretty much different.

One of the design goals of Fedora is to install along side Windows 7/8 UEFI, 
with a UEFI installation of Fedora. At this point it might be worth trying 
Fedora 19 beta, so that if you encounter problems you can file a bug and 
thereby make the distribution better.


Chris Murphy