Tweaking the Mint
Finish the Mint installation, enjoy a fresh view of your Windows files and learn more about UEFI.
T
he “Installation type” dialog that pops up when you click “Something else” is a little intimidating at first glance. You should see a map of your Windows drive and a colour-coded list of its partitions, as well as any free space in between them. If you’ve got another drive it’ll likely appear at the bottom of the list, so scroll down to it. If it’s unformatted you’ll need to click New Partition Table and accept the warning that all current partitions will be removed. Don’t use this option on your Windows drive unless you don’t want to use it ever again!
(Is
that
a
bad
thing?–Ed)
You’ll now be able to select the free space in the new drive and create partitions for
KEEPING THINGS SIMPLE
“The simplest setup is to have a single partition occupying the whole drive. Mint by default will select the Ext4 filesystem, and so should you.”
EFING AROUND…
While the EFI capsules that kick our OSes into life are stored in the EFI partition (usually mounted at /boot/efi/ on Linux) the data about which order to attempt loading them is stored in non-volatile memory (NVRAM) deep in the firmware. This and other data is collectively referred to as the EFI variables, or efivars for short. In general you shouldn’t be messing with these, but UEFI is a complicated standard (most implementations run to millions of lines of code) and occasionally there are bugs. If, for example, you find you’re unable to change the boot order from the firmware interface, then you might be able to use efibootmgrto fix it.
To make Ubuntu boot first, preserving the rest of the order, $ sudo efibootmgr -o 0005,0001,0004,0002,0000,0003 There isn’t really a Windows equivalent of efibootmgrto, but there is BCDEdit for editing Windows Boot Configuration Database. This deals only with Windows Boot Manager...