Dual Boot on Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro

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I write this blog as one has to really understand as to what one is doing while dual booting. I will write the process I followed for my Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro.

Now, this modern day laptops come with UEFI(Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) rather than BIOS. Now this won’t allow to make changes to boot file. So, one cannot see the dual boot screen that grub shows when one has dual boot.

To cut the long talk short, I would describe as to what process to follow:

  1. Download USB Installer
  2. Download iso file of your Ubuntu or any other linux version. I am writing this in context with Ubuntu 15.10 alongside host OS windows 10.
  3. Make a bootable pen-drive using USB Installer. Take 3-4 GB pendrive if possible and make some of the memory persistent if you want to store some of the files and use it for further use. (There is a hack by which you can extend the pendrive’s persistent memory more than 4 GB which is allowed in standard by USB Installer but I won’t go in details of that. ) When I say make a bootable pendrive, you will need to follow the steps mentioned in usb installer, i.e. format your usb drive, install iso on it. USB Installer offers very intuitive interface.
  4. Once done with this, one would not like to loose windows. Also, this is now pain because some of the laptops come with pre-installed windows where key is embedded in BIOS itself and it becomes difficult or at least I don’t know how to install it back if I loose windows.
  5. So, to be safe, create partition. How to create partition? Open disk management by right clicking on windows. There you can see your disk structure. Now, if you click on one of the partitions you will see options like shrink volume, extend volume etc. What does shrink volume mean? Shrink volume means decreasing the size of this partition and make it free by a specified amount. So once you click on shrink volume option it will show you the space available for the partition. Free that much space.
  6. Once free space is created, we can now use that free space to install/uninstall linux OS. Reboot pressing a small button besides the power button in Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro.
  7. I should boot from pendrive But wait !!! Now our UEFI will create the problem as it won’t allow to boot from usb. So first go to bios menu and disable secure boot and fast boot. Once you are done with that again reboot and select boot menu.
  8. Then grub will appear. Click on Try Ubuntu. Follow the steps to install. Be careful to select install updates and connect to the wifi. The catch here is if you have not selected the installation of third party software installation there might be a problem further installing the drivers for wifi.

Ok. This looks pretty simple. Right? I successfully did this process in the first attempt following the references but I forgot to check on the option of installing third party software. So now what’s work around. There are couple of sites that say to blacklist ideapad_laptop. But, I don’t see my wifi working with that option. You should definitely select the installation of third party software radio box. That makes life easier. I had to reinstall Ubuntu for that. But, what happened next it gave me grub error. Why? Well there are lot of confusing stuffs around and I won’t say they are invalid. They are the reasons in general for the problem. But here when I say reinstall, I would have followed an uninstallation process before installing the ubuntu again. Please follow these steps in unistalling ubuntu.

  1. Disable partition: We will use the same disk management that we used to allocate free space to deallocate it. Once we deallocate it. I thought I am done here. But wait? No !!! Not done. It’s not that straight forward. Because if you observe there is an EFI partition which has ubuntu boot loader file stored and you have only wiped off the memory which had OS but it’s boot and grub hasn’t been wiped off. So, wiping that off will complete the process.
  2. Wipe off Ubuntu folder from EFI partition: To do this you have to use Windows Command Prompt ( I know it sucks !!!) but still 😦  How to do this?
  3. Start your command prompt as administrator. To do this right click on command prompt and select the option of run as administrator. Type bcdedit /enum all and figure out the partition corresponding to ubuntu. (Check the description). Having done that copy the UUID corresponding to that and /bcdedit delete {UUID}.
  4. Next step is to clean up the EFI partition. To do that first we have to mount onto that EFI partition. So that’s pretty straight forward in linux using mount command. How do we do it here? We use diskpart.
  5. Command: diskpart
  6. Command: list vol
  7. Oh you should see the volume corresponding to the EFI. Select volume corresponding to the EFI partition that would read “EFI Network in the description”. Select that volume using: select vol x where x is the volume number of the EFI network. Assign a letter with the command: assign letter Z: . Normally it should be a letter that is not being used in your current windows file system. So basically what is being done here is mounting the EFI partition to  Z: drive.
  8. Ok now all has to be done is delete the ubuntu folder in this EFI partition. Command: delete Z:/EFI/ubuntu
  9. Reboot !!

Yo !! Done with the uninstallation. Please follow this EFI deallocation otherwise this might create problem related to boot and grub as it doesn’t get uninstalled. Enjoy linux along windows 🙂 The references I have attached below shows installation, uninstallation process. There is one uinstallation process that can be followed as mentioned in other blog of everydaylinuxuser.com where they explain uninstalling using efibootmgr.

References:

  1. http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2015/11/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-alongside.html
  2. EFI cleaning

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