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Presently, I am using Windows 7 and Fedora 17 on my laptop. Both OSes work fine.

I am thinking of upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 8, while keeping Fedora where it is. Keeping Fedora 17 on my system is a must. Some articles I've read say it is not possible to have a dual boot setup involving Windows 8. Is that true?

Question: what known issues are there for dual-booting with Windows 8 and Linux? How can they be solved?

Pops
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Abid Rahman K
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2 Answers2

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The only issue I'm aware of is the battle between the NTLoader and Grub. In order to boot something other than Windows, you must use Grub (or syslinux or lilo or some other customizeable boot loader), but the Windows boot loader doesn't play nice with any of them... and is not capable of booting into Linux.

You can install grub with full dual-booting capabilities, and it will boot into Windows8... but there is no guarantee that Windows 8 won't overwrite the MBR and break everything. There are a few reasons why win8 decides to re-write the MBR... and most aren't obvious.

TheCompWiz
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I'm dual-booting win 8 and ubuntu OK; the main issue that I've got is with UEFI boot (see Dual boot Windows 8 and Ubuntu? ) . If you don't need UEFI, and can disable it in your BIOS, do that before install Windows 8, as it might make things a little trickier. Alternately, work out how to get Linux to boot from UEFI instead.

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askvictor
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