Hi,
Proud owner of an Asus ROG G750JX for around 6 months now. This is my first post so please correct me if I'm not posting in the right place.
This is my first machine with UEFI. I used to work with Linux a lot. But ever since I bought this machine, I have been weary of any experimenting. Recently though, I read a few reviews regarding operation and performance of this machine with Linux and it seems to be far more compatible with Linux than any of my previous laptops (Dell and HP mostly, but one Acer). I would like to dual boot the existing Windows 8 with Linux.
One thing that I have noticed is that there is no way to make this machine boot with GRUB (or is there?) AFAIK, it will boot directly the default UEFI partition (which is Windows on Disk 1) unless the boot process is interrupted (F1 displays a boot menu, I think?)
Now this contains two 750GB SATA drives. At this moment, Windows 8 is installed on Disk 1 (or sda, if you will) and also there are recovery partitions (and a UEFI partition) on Disk 1. Disk 0, currently has one large NTFS partition I used to keep stuff that I moved to my external HDD recently so Disk 0 is basically empty. I wanna install Linux on Disk 0. So when I'll boot, the system will boot Windows from Disk 1 unless I press F1 and select Disk 0. Then it'll boot GRUB. Am I correct so far?
Now with my previous laptops, I used to reset and recreate my partitions from scratch. I would basically make a backup of recovery partitions using some kind of software that vendor provided. The backup was in form of 2-3 recovery DVDs. And then I would delete everything from disks. All partitions, everything. I would then create an NTFS partition, install Windows on it and then boot Linux from live DVD, install Linux on a separate ext4 partition and after all that is done, create one large partition on the remaining disk space, usually NTFS, that I will use to dump non-OS data etc. Then when I powered up the system, I got GRUB, I could go to Windows if I wanted or boot Linux instead.
The problem with this one is, I don't know how UEFI works different from other loaders. I used Backtrack to create a system backup on a USB. In
this image, you can see the partition setup on Disk 1. Normally I would presume that everything that was one the highlighted partitions has been transferred on to the USB by backtrack. But I don't wanna be quick in making that assumption because normally there would be only one recovery partition. Here there are 3 of them, of various sizes. I wanna delete all of them (I suppose I cannot delete the UEFI partition because that is what the loader boots from?) and extend my C: and F: (which should be
😧 after I'm done with Disk 0) on Disk 1 so that Disk 1 is just UEFI partition, C: and F:. Can I do that? Can I delete the highlighted partitions and still be able to boot my system as I described above? And after deleting them, can I use the backup USB pen-drive to restore my machine to factory settings, if need be?
These are some key questions that I need answered, if anyone experienced and knowledgeable enough can answer them. I need to do the stuff mentioned and install Linux on Disk 0 (two different distributions) as soon as possible because there's some work pending related to that.
Thank you for your time and might I say, it has been lovely so far on ROG forums! Cheers!
