WIP - ASUS TP300LA - Windows 10 + Fedora 23 - dual boot

Work in Progress

Purchased an ASUS TP300LA notebook last Christmas. Documenting my journey here. Please leave a comment if you spot anything that is wrong (share if you know more than what I have discovered; or better still, warn me if I am doing something stupid etc. etc.)

Most important - recovery drive

It came with Windows 8.1. I make sure I create a recovery drive so that I can recover the system if I mess things up. Made a USB Recovery Drive (TODO - USB size).

SSD

It had a 500GB HDD built in. I was keen on replacing that with an SSD. Got a 960GB SanDisk Ultra II SSD. Swapped the drives and used the recovery drive to restore the system.

At that point in time it had partitions sda1 (305MB RE), sda2 (100MB EFI), sda3 (128MB MS reserved), sda4 (C drive), and sda5 (ASUS recovery drive).

Windows 10

Then upgraded to Windows 10. This created a 450MB partition (Windows 10 boot, I believe) at the end of the C drive partition.

I wanted to move all boot partitions etc before the partition for the C drive, reduce the C drive partition and blitz the ASUS recovery drive - thereby creating room for a Fedora install.

Using GParted, I moved the 450MB partition before the C drive partition. Reduced the C drive to under 100GB. That left under half the C drive free for installing software if I decided to use Windows 10 (unlikely to be very much). ASUS recovery partition was deleted (since we have a Recovery USB Drive now anyway).

Fedora 23 Workstation install

Installed Fedora 23 x64 Workstation. 

The plan is to have an encrypted swap, /home and /tmp for security. 

During installation, selected Custom Partitioning. Defined the partition manually. ~ 500MB for /boot, LUKS encrypted 6GB (same size as the RAM) for swap, 100GB at the end of the drive for /home (LUKS encrypted) and the remaining in between for /

Below screenshot shots how things looked.

Encrypting /home

Boot up to the Fedora Login prompt. Press CTRL + ALT + F2 to bring up the console. Log in as root. Following commands are used to make a copy of /home

Code

[root] mkdir homebackup [root] cp -a /home/* homebackup/ # Make a new dm-crypt device cryptsetup --verify-passphrase -v luksFormat /dev/sda9 # cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda9 fc23home # verify cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sda9 # mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/fc23home # remove lost+found rm -rf /home/* # cp -a homebackup/* /home

Code

/etc/crypttab /etc/fstab

Now I have a dual boot Windows 10 + Fedora 23 Workstation on my ASUS TP300LA.

Good things noticed:

• Hibernation works great