Installing Linux (CentOS 7) on an older Windows laptop. Even being a developer, installing Linux has never been a simple and straightforward process to me.
I found documentation on how to install CentOS 7 with dual-boot somewhat lacking on the internet (note: dual boot is not officially supported in CentOS). Here are the steps I took with the following hardware: Motherboard: X99-E WS USB3.1 CPU: Intel i7-5930K GPU: NVIDIA GTX 1080 SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 500Gb 1) First install Windows 10. Partition the drive to leave 200Gb available for the Linux install 2) Download CentOS 7 (everything ISO) from 3) Burn the ISO to a bootable USB thumbdrive with. Other tools are possible, see. 4) This is the tricky part: you next need to enable a UEFI boot from the CentOS thumb drive.
With the X99-E WS motherboard, I found the following BIOS settings necessary, thanks to this: CSMDisabled Secure BootDisabled. Secure BootOther OS Fast Boot Disabled Drag EFI CentOS 7 Install to top boot priority.To do this, go to Secure BootKey ManagementSave Secure KeysSelect USB Thumb Drive. Then go to Secure BootKey ManagementDelete Platform Key (PK). Only this one, not the other keys. Save and restart.
Centos 7 Kvm Install Windows Server 2016
Then Secure Boot will be disabled. 5) Boot the CentOS installation thumbdrive.
The opensource Nvidia driver, Nouveau, doesn’t play nice with the GTX1080, so disable them in the bootmenu. To do this, follow this and Select 1 ‘Install CentOS 7’ and press ‘e’ to modify the bootloader commands.
Then add the following after ‘quiet’: nomodeset rdblacklist=nouveau Press CNTRL-X and the boot loader should continue with the installation. 6) When you get to selecting the installation destination, you should manually partition and format the drive- don’t use auto partition. Be careful not to format any of the windows partitions, but you do need to look down the windows partitions for the EFI System Partition, and add a mount point of /boot/efi. I found this helpful. 7) Finish the install, remove the USB thumb drive, and you should now be able to dual boot into CentOS 7 or Windows. Posted in Tagged,.