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Re: [LUG] UEFI bios and Gforce 460 dueling

 

On 04/08/12 17:05, Kevin Lucas wrote:
> Hi all 
>
> I need some guidance with install a new PC It has UEFI bios, Intel quad
> core, 8 gig of RAM and a GFX 460 Nvidia graphics card. As usual I
> offered to help to introduce linux to an avid Gamer.
>
> I installed Win 7 ok 
> then after a lot of mucking about with the Bios I got it to boot a live
> CD ( UEFI installs a Windows BootLoader, so you have CD sata0 and
> "windows bootloader" as boot choices, of course WBL was first).
>
> Eventually I get a distro to run ( Fedora 17 64 bit ) but only on the
> onboard Graphics (intel) but it does see the 8Gig of Ram. None have so
> far seen the Win7 boot partition and now Fedora has deleted the EFI
> entry in the Bios!
>
> I can fix this with a win disk but...
>
> What is the best way to approach this
>
> and...
>  Do I have any chance of running Linux on the GFX 460 (1Gig RAm)
> Graphics.

Your post is extremely confusing... what motherboard does this system
have? Unless you have an extremely odd el cheapo Chinese board (Foxconn
make some very crappy motherboards for example) setting this system up
to dual boot win7/linux should be incredibly trivial. Whatever you are
doing, you are evidently doing it very wrong so:

Reset the UEFI to defaults to undo any strange things you have done to
it. Turn off the TPM module if you have one, set the UEFI boot order
correctly (Disk, USB, DVD) and figure out which key to press during boot
to access the boot menu (on my MSI board for example I press F11 to get
a nice graphical list of available devices to boot from). You may need
to find - and disable - the onboard graphics settings in UEFI as well,
or at least tell it to initialize the Nvidia PCIe card instead. You
should also make sure that SATA mode is set to AHCI.

(Re)install win7: by default it will create a 100Mb NTFS formatted
System Reserved partition (the bootloader) and a main partition, also
NTFS, sized according to your instructions during install. The remainder
of your disk (I'm presuming you only have one) can be used to
arbitrarily lay out your linux system which needs to be done after the
windows install. Do yourself another favour and stop using CDs if your
motherboard supports booting from USB - as it's apparently a modern one
supporting UEFI it certainly should boot from USB.

Any modern linux distribution whatsoever will support NTFS out of the
box during the install process, and most will even allow editing
(moving, shrinking, etc) of any NTFS partitions detected. Fedora 17
certainly does: I am unsure what  you mean by your previous linux
attempts have failed to "see" the windows partitions and can make even
less sense out of Fedora "deleting" EFI entries (it certainly hasn't,
perhaps you could clarify this a little more).

Once you have your linux system installed as well make sure that the
ntfs-3g package is installed from your package manager (it usually is by
default, but check anyway). Your Nvidia 460 is definitely supported
under linux:
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/object/linux-display-amd64-295.59-driver-uk.html
- you will need to install the nvidia driver package either from your
distribution's repositories or direct from Nvidia.

However, considering there is a local exploit
(http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.security.full-disclosure/86747)
allowing trivial privilege escalation to root in all current Nvidia
binary linux drivers which they don't seem to care about fixing, you may
just want to stick with the open source nouveau driver instead if the
performance is acceptable.

Let us know how you get on - if you're unlucky you may need to modify
the grub command to disable ACPI or something to enable initial booting
of the linux installer but we'll deal with that if it comes up.

Regards,

Mat

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