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Booting multiple O/S on Y500?


4REAL

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Hi guys

Have just discovered this forum and it looks like a pretty skilled and well informed bunch of peeps :)

I have just bought a Y500 (coming tue, s/h, 3630qm, 16gb ram, SLI ) it has a standard 1tb HDD, and i have bought a 256gb M4 msata to whack in the slot and was kinda hoping to install Win7 AND Ubuntu on that drive and keep the 1tb drive for storage / Win8 (can be problematic removing Win8? due to 'one touch' etc??)

Wondering if anyone else has tried multiple OS on here?

I have Ubuntu / Win7 on my current laptop (6 partitions) and i only ever use windows to use certain softwares which dont support linux, as i just dont fly with the whole breadhead microsoft concept (although plan to do a bit of gaming now with the lenovo and SLI :)

(and hopefully O/C the C/Gpu's too if i can get hold of the new BIOS that svI7 has been so tirelessly working on from what i can see! :)

From what i can tell from trawling the net, it seems Lenovo have this thing pretty sewn up for some reason, and doing anything out of the norm is severely restricted?

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Yes i was thinking disabling the ufei or whatever its called secure boot thingy was the first thing to do..

We'll see how it goes.. normally i partition for *home* *swap* and *root*

I'll stick windows on first i think and just get it running

Make sure you go with a version of linux that supports the efi booting. Also you may have to disable the secure boot. I have not try linux it my y400 but plan to soon.
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  • 2 months later...

A touch late, but I can verify that Ubuntu and Windows 8 coexist "okay." By "okay" I mean Ubuntu properly resized the Windows NTFS partition, properly installed itself, and properly boots if you toggle "legacy mode" compatibility in the BIOS. The problem is that then Windows 8 doesn't boot, and you have to toggle back to "EFI mode" in the BIOS to get Windows 8 to boot.

... but then Ubuntu won't boot. It's a hassle, but if you don't swap back and forth too often and tend to stick with one or the other for the most part, it doesn't seem to hurt anything.

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I also have Ubuntu installed alongside Windows 7 (primary) and windows 8 (never use it). Works great, just somewhat cumbersome to switch between them as Code mentioned. There's a way to have the ubuntu bootloader come up and give you the option of selecting between them without having go into Bios/boot menu, but I'm too lazy to attempt doing all that, lol.

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Can anyone confirm that mSATA booting works fine with 2.5" attached? My Y400 can't seem to do this when loading mSATA with Ubuntu and my 2.5" with Win7. Booting off 2.5" works fine but mSATA just gives a blank screen. When I remove the 2.5" or insert it in the CD/DVD slot mSATA boots fine though... anyone else with similar problem?

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Can anyone confirm that mSATA booting works fine with 2.5" attached? My Y400 can't seem to do this when loading mSATA with Ubuntu and my 2.5" with Win7. Booting off 2.5" works fine but mSATA just gives a blank screen. When I remove the 2.5" or insert it in the CD/DVD slot mSATA boots fine though... anyone else with similar problem?
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Code, can we re-install Windows 8 on "legacy mode"?

Apologies for answering late. That's an excellent question, I never considered trying that... I'm not at all sure. I'm guessing it would work, but you may run into little problems (I'm sure Windows 8 takes advantage of at least something provided by the non-legacy BIOS). I'm not an authority on EFI BIOSs, so take it with a grain of salt, but again I'm going to guess yes.

The issue of course is that your product key is in the non-legacy BIOS stuff, if I'm correct, soooo... yeah. You might have to buy a new one or something...

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  • 2 weeks later...
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by the 2.5in - do you refer to the internal 2.5in drive? I've got a dual-GPU setup forcing me to fill both internal drive bays, and I haven't had an issue with my BIOS set on legacy mode.
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I'm just getting started with this awesome laptop. But, I have had great success UEFI wise.

I've got Opensuse 12.3 , and Windows 8 EFI boot options with no need for legacy mode.

Plus I can switch to legacy mode and use it for other additions, as I progress (or regress in the legacy case).

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