[CentOS] Dual Boot Windows 8 & CentOS 6.4

[Nicolas Thierry-Mieg]

amit joshi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am studying for the RHCSA Exam and wanted to install CentOS 6.4 alongside Windows 8. I got a new laptop with a processor that supports virtualization.
>
> I am planning to remove all the recovery partitions after backing up all drivers etc. on them. Lets see how it works out.
>
> Any caveats I should know about?

I recently installed 6.4 in dual boot with windows 8, on a new modern 
laptop.
There were initially a bunch of smallish partitions, some apparently for 
recovery, others for hibernate or expresscache (this laptop has a HDD 
with a small 24G SSD) or whatnot.
IMO it's not so easy to find out what each partition is used for - 
although admittedly I haven't had much windows exposure since XP.
So, if you want to keep your windows fully functional, rather than 
removing these partitions I would recommend shrinking one or more of the 
"real" windows partitions (C: or D: or wherever you have space). You can 
do that easily within win8 through the control panel.
The 6.4 installer will then use that free space and all should be fine.

On the laptop I worked with, disabling secure boot was a bios option, 
you should have it too if your laptop uses uefi.

The most pain I had was finding out what the 18G partition on the SSD 
was used for (expresscache, which I disabled so I could remove that 
partition and use it for centos), and I had to put the /boot partition 
on the HDD otherwise grub wouldn't see it. I also put /var and /tmp (and 
/home of course) on the HDD, and created / for the rest on the SSD. It 
seems to work fine, although I'm a bit worried as to how long the ssd 
will last.

HTH