Dual Boot XPS 13

I finally broke down and upgraded my personal laptop to a new Dell XPS 13. The Dell XPS is available in a developer edition that has Ubuntu installed, but I decided instead to go with one with Windows 10 Pro. I like the direction Microsoft is going, and with a recent job change I’m obligated to work on a Windows system anyway.

As usual, my primary Operating System is going to be Linux, more specifically Fedora. With UEFI, secure boot, and Sata configuration, dual booting is now a bit more complicated than it used to be.

Big Disclaimer

I don’t know Windows very well. The steps below disable some security features of the laptop and Windows Operating System to play more nicely with Linux. I primarily use Linux, and will be using a secure configuration on that OS, and not using Windows for anything personal or significant. I would not recommend disabling these features if you plan to use Windows as the primary operating system. Seek help from someone more qualified and knowledgable than me if so.

TLDR

  1. Create a recovery key
  2. Shrink the Windows Partition
  3. Disable BitLocker
  4. Disable Fast Boot
  5. Set to boot to Safe Mode
  6. Reboot, access BIOS
  7. Change Sata mode to AHCI from RAID
  8. Disable Secure Boot (Optional, see section for more information)
  9. Reboot, disable boot to safe mode, Reboot
  10. Insert USB Install Media to RIGHT USB port
  11. Install in reclaimed space from shrunken partition
  12. Verify both OSes are accessible on completion

Preparing the Laptop and Windows

There are a few steps to make the Operating Systems play nicely together.

Create a recovery drive

First thing to do is create a recovery key in Windows in case things go south. This is somewhere in the control panel, but hitting the super key and typing “recovery” is enough to get you there. Put in a USB drive of 16GB or greater, and follow the prompts to create a system recovery.

Shrink the Windows partition

Gone are the days of one or two partitions on a harddrive. Thanks to UEFI this XPS already had a handful of partitions. There was the UEFI boot partition, the Windows partion, a Dell Support partition, and a Windows recovery tools partition. Drive partitions can be accessed through pressing te super key and ‘L’. The Windows partition should be fairly obvious by the label and being the largest partition. Right click on that, shrink to the size of your choosing.

I opted for a 1TB hard drive which meant the Windows partition was somewhere around 990GB. I shrunk that down to 250GB to give Linux a nice 730GB or so. This is obviously up to you and what you plan on doing with the OSes.

Disable BitLocker

I use disk encryption on every computer I use that isn’t a server, and wanted to keep it that way with Windows. However, through the process of setting up the system to dual boot the BitLocker key was required due to Windows detecting changes. Despite using the “Save Key to Microsoft Account” option, it was not available in my account. There are other options such as printing it or saving it to a USB key, but I opted instead to disable it. Super key, type “bitlocker”, follow prompts.

Disable Fast Boot

Fast boot may start Windows faster but it can block from loading Grub to boot into Linux. A shutdown on Windows with fast boot acts more like a hibernate, which prevents loading grub. A restart is more like a full shutdown that would result in a UEFI boot.

Change Sata mode to AHCI

The laptop is configured to use a RAID mode for the NVMe drive, and out of the box Linux will not see drives with this configuration. I didn’t dig deeper into this than a search on how to configure an existing Windows install to use AHCI.

Super key + R, type msconfig, click on the boot to safe mode.

Restart, press F2 to configure the BIOS in the Sata configuration to use AHCI

While you’re in the BIOS, you may want to disable Secure Boot while you’re in there too. Linux will run, but I ran into issues on compiling and running unsigned kernel modules.

Also, you may want to review the function keys mode. The BIOS default is to require pressing FN + F{\d} to use a function key as a function key. Otherwise it will use the secondary function (such as volume). I prefer to use function keys as function keys, and secondaries as secondaries.

Apply changes, exit, boot to Windows. Safe mode will require your full Microsoft password. Once it loads you’re good to disable safe mode and restart again, there isn’t further configuration needed here.

Install Linux

The following assumes you’re already familar with getting and installing the Linux distribution of your choice.

Boot to Linux install media

Insert the USB drive into the RIGHT side USB port on the XPS.

Reboot the laptop, hit the delete key when the system starts to load, press F12 to select boot options.

Choose the USB hard drive

Install Linux

Follow through the Linux installation. See your distro of choice for more information. The key here to ensure that the system is only installing on the free space from shrinking the Windows primary partition, and to install the boot loader in the UEFI boot partition.

Once the installer completes, reboot and enjoy your dual boot system.

What to do if it fails

The XPS comes with a recovery partition. If something goes wrong and Windows isn’t available, use the Windows troubleshooter to boot the recovery partition and reinstall Windows. I did have to do this, and the reinstall only reinstalled the OS, it didn’t change partitioning, so the Linux system was untouched.

If you cleared out the recovery partition to free up more space, use your recovery drive created in the first step (you did create a recovery drive, right?) to reinstall the system.

Comments are closed.