First of all, I apologize if this is the wrong place to post this question. However, I think people here would be able to help me best.
I have Fedora 40 installed as my main operating, but I have to dual boot windows for work-related purposes.
My laptop is Lenovo Legion 5 15ACH6.
My specs
AMD Ryzen™ 7 5800H with Radeon™ Graphics × 16
RAM 16GB
512GB SSD 15.6
NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3050 Ti Laptop GPU
When I try to install windows, I get this error: “A media driver your computer needs is missing. This could be a DVD, USB or Hard disk driver. If you have a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive with the driver on it, please insert it now.”
I am not really sure where to find those drivers. I also could not find the SATA mode in the BIOS settings. Could it be that my Fedora installation is somehow conflicting with windows installing windows?
How are you trying to install Windows? Using a USB or in a VM ? I know you said you are trying to Dual Boot, but something seems off here.
I have the same Laptop but mine is branded IdeapadGaming 3 15ACH6, This laptop has an NVMe drive so you do not need a SATA mode.
I go back to my fiorst observation, How are you trying to install Windows?
Are you on the desktop clicking on the Windows ISO file?
Did you burn the Windows ISO onto a USB and something happened while trying to install ?
I think something is wrong in this process, please provide more details. Also, I think for Dual Boot to work, you have to have Windows installed first, then Fedora. . . But I am no longer an expert in Dual Boot setups.
Hello, thanks for your reply.
The way I have tried to install was to burn the official ISO onto a USB flash drive then Boot into it as usual. What I understand from your reply is that it would not be possible to install windows after installing fedora, in that case, I suppose I would need to uninstall fedora first and then reinstall it after installing windows, is that correct?
The usually situation is that a system has windows installed.
You shrink the windows partition so there is soave for fedora.
Now you install Fedora into the space you freed up.
The fedora install will auto detect Windows and set duel boot.
If you want to access the files on Windows partition from Fedora do not enable bitlocker.
If you do enable bitlock make sure to save the bitlocker recovery key.
You will need this to unlock the windows disk after you install Fedora.
Correct, but even simpler may be to use libvirt KVM/QEMU and install windows into a VM that can be run after booting fedora. This avoids the requirement to install windows first then install fedora in dual boot. It also allows having both running at the same time and a simple switch of windows on the screen to access the windows OS with out rebooting.
I dual boot my system with Windows, and I did it exactly the way @barryascott described.
A couple of more thoughts on things to consider:
During the partition phase of the Windows install, if there is one, you may want to increase your EFI partition size. If I’m remembering correctly, folks doing the Unified Kernel business are recommending 1Gib minimum for that.
Once you have Windows installed, you will also need to deselect its hybrid power-off hibernation state, fastboot, while you’re booted into it for the things that he described doing. I’m pretty sure MS sets that to “on” by default.
I usually use 2 CPUs and somewhere between 4G and 8G ram, which depends upon what I am planning to use the installation for and how many VMs I will have running simultaneously. I also tend to over-provision most of my VMs.
You can pass the USB device to the VM, I used to do this with older Android Devices when I was far more active in the space. Google Pixel 2XL, Firmware Flash of devices like JayBird (RUN XT, RUN, X3, Freedom ) Samsung Galaxy ( several models ), Medical Devices ( Glucose, Ketogenic instruments).
But if you are doing Android work, there are WAY better solutions native to Linux like adb and other tools now.
