Moving Zorin SSD

On my current laptop, a Toshiba X205-Sli4, I have an Hdd with Windows 7 Pro on it,(which came with it), and an SSD, that I added to it and installed Zorin 6.2 to it. Grub is on the SSD,(sda). The OSs are on their own drives, in fact I can press F12, select the HDD, and the machine boots directly to Windows like it did when I first got it.
I just bought an Alienware 14 laptop with Window 7 Ultimate on it and it has a UEFI Hdd on it, which I don't want to "touch" if I can help it.
Checking in the BIOS it shows that it's running in Legacy mode and I don't see anything about secure boot in the Bios. Maybe that doesn't "show up" unless you turn UEFI mode on maybe?
I would like to add the SSD to the new laptop without reinstalling Zorin, if possible. If this is possible, do I somehow need to uninstall the settings for display,(which I believe is just a matter of reverting back to the initial video drivers?). How do I "uninstall" the sound card "drivers", LAN "drivers", touchpad "drivers", etc. or will Zorin just pick these up when I install the SSD in the new laptop and run it the first time? Or am I just creating a huge headache and it would be better to reformat the SSD and start with a new install?
If I do need to reinstall, where should Grub reside? This UEFI nonsense has got me really confused, I don't want to do something stupid and erase something on the Hdd that the laptop needs to boot the machine. Looking at the Hdd in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disc Management in Windows 7, I see 3 partitions, a 39Mb OEM, a 10.20Gb Recovery(Primary), and a 688.40Gb OS (Primary) Partitions. If I understand this correctly, there is part of the boot code that resides on the Hdd with a UEFI system. I want to put Zorin on this new laptop, without disturbing the Hdd, but I don't understand the UEFI thing well enough to just go ahead and install Zorin like I would a Legacy system.
Can someone help me, or tell me where I can find the info. on the Net, to help with the installation?
Thanks,
Snyde

Basically, UEFI was introduced with Windows 8 - It would appear Alienware have enabled legacy support (which makes sense - otherwise Windows 7 would not run!

Firstly, does the new machine allow the installation of a second hard drive? Is it SSD compliant?

You stated that you put the GRUB in the root mbr of the SSD - if that is the case, leave as is.

I am not sure what will happen with graphics etc as this is written to in the xorg.conf file - I would test the drive and if your system allows to choose a 'one-time' boot (F!2 ? or some other Function key?) then choose the SSD but when Grub loads, press the tab key and enter 'nomodeset' ) without the quotes. As for sound I have noticed this will be picked up separately - speaking from personal experience when tryinig soundblaster alongside on-board ATi (AMD) Audio - you just have to 'tweak' your sound settings in 'System Settings | Hardware'.#

Good Luck! and Keep us posted.

Update - had another thought - if UEFI has been disabled in the BIOS and legacy is enabled, boot from Zorin Live - that will at least tell you if Zorin is compatible with your Alienware rig - you may need to do the 'nomodeset' thing too as I think they use nVidia graphics.

Swarfendor437 wrote:Basically, UEFI was introduced with Windows 8 - It would appear Alienware have enabled legacy support (which makes sense - otherwise Windows 7 would not run!

Firstly, does the new machine allow the installation of a second hard drive? Is it SSD compliant?

You stated that you put the GRUB in the root mbr of the SSD - if that is the case, leave as is.

I am not sure what will happen with graphics etc as this is written to in the xorg.conf file - I would test the drive and if your system allows to choose a 'one-time' boot (F!2 ? or some other Function key?) then choose the SSD but when Grub loads, press the tab key and enter 'nomodeset' ) without the quotes. As for sound I have noticed this will be picked up separately - speaking from personal experience when tryinig soundblaster alongside on-board ATi (AMD) Audio - you just have to 'tweak' your sound settings in 'System Settings | Hardware'.#

Good Luck! and Keep us posted.

Update - had another thought - if UEFI has been disabled in the BIOS and legacy is enabled, boot from Zorin Live - that will at least tell you if Zorin is compatible with your Alienware rig - you may need to do the 'nomodeset' thing too as I think they use nVidia graphics.

I ordered Windows 7 hoping that the computer, an Alienware 14, would have a "normal" BIOS and no UEFI BIOS, but it does have UEFI, but it was shipped in legacy mode with no secure boot enabled. I don't plan on using Windows 7 anyway, unless I have a particular game or app I can't get to run in WINE, or can't get some version of Linux to run on it.
I have no experience with this UEFI thing, but I have a friend that bought a new Windows 8 computer and brought it to me after he tried to install Ubuntu on it. He tried to install it on the same hard drive that had Windows 8 on it. The installation failed, and when it was turned on afterwards the only thing it would do is blink the power button and caps lock leds, no boot, no screen. I tried to get it to run, and couldn't figure out how to restore the hard drive. It has a button to start a some kind of system restore, but that didn't function either. All I can figure is his installation wrote over some part of the hard drive making it unbootable. I don't know if the same thing could happen with this machine, but I'm being very caution, and I'm not gonna install Linux on the stock drive if I don't have to.
A second drive is possible on this laptop, although I'm not sure about MY particular drive. I read on the Alienware forum where a user tried to install an OCZ SSD and the laptop wouldn't "see" it, but he was able to get a Crucial SSD to work and I read that Alienware recommended Sandisk SSDs, this is gonna be a trial and error thing.
Yes Grub is installed at the root mbr of the SSD.
F12 does bring up the boot menu.
Yes, it uses Nvidia graphics, a GeForce GTX 765M, 2G
I will try the nomodeset option on the live DVD and post my results later.
Thanks for your help!
Snyde

Hi Snyde, Glad to be of help - as I have said elsewhere I would love to get my mits on a Windows 8 notebook and have a play!

In the meantime the screenshots here may help your friend - if not he might be better claiming a warranty repair but not try to install Linux again!

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5434

You will never be able to get a dual--boot of Windows 8 and GNU/Linux on the same hard drive - unless the GNU/Linux distro has an EFI file too - the only ones that provide this are Ubuntu and Fedora at present - even then I would be dubious!

I only got 8.1 preview installed on this rig because the mobo is not EFI - even then I took the precaution of disconnecting my two other hard drives so that it would not bauk by seeing more than 4 primary OS's!

If possible, if you do get Zorin to boot live would be useful to see a screenshot of your partition by launching 'gparted' and then using 'Screenshot' from 'Accessories' and posting back here.

How to upload is in this tutorial video I uploaded some time ago:

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v385833212XzmANbj

Swarfendor437 wrote:Hi Snyde, Glad to be of help - as I have said elsewhere I would love to get my mits on a Windows 8 notebook and have a play!

In the meantime the screenshots here may help your friend - if not he might be better claiming a warranty repair but not try to install Linux again!

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5434

You will never be able to get a dual--boot of Windows 8 and GNU/Linux on the same hard drive - unless the GNU/Linux distro has an EFI file too - the only ones that provide this are Ubuntu and Fedora at present - even then I would be dubious!

I only got 8.1 preview installed on this rig because the mobo is not EFI - even then I took the precaution of disconnecting my two other hard drives so that it would not bauk by seeing more than 4 primary OS's!

If possible, if you do get Zorin to boot live would be useful to see a screenshot of your partition by launching 'gparted' and then using 'Screenshot' from 'Accessories' and posting back here.

How to upload is in this tutorial video I uploaded some time ago:

http://www.veoh.com/watch/v385833212XzmANbj

My Alienware laptop was shipped with Windows 7 in legacy mode. I don't want to install Zorin on the Windows drive anyway, I want to keep it on the SSD that it's on,(that's in my other laptop), and add this to the Alienware laptop anyway so hopefully none of this UEFI c*** is gonna come into play.
So far, I have tried multiple versions of Zorin live dvds and they will load the OS, but the desktop image is "torn" into 4 images, even if I use the nomodeset option. I've tried Ubunti 13.10 with and without the nomodeset option and it won't even load the desktop, though the "Live" installation screen will load, but it goes no farther after I tell it to "try" Ubuntu.
My partition info. is like this:
39M (OEM) , 10.20 G NTFS (Recovery), 688.40G NTFS (OS)


Right now I'm trying to find a version of Linux that doesn't "tear" the desktop screen after it loads. Until I can find one, I can't go any further.
Thanks for the help,
Snyde

Hi snydley100, Yes I think the OEM is a bit like NEC's 'glue' partition they had on their towers some years ago which is needed for the recovery partition to work - these things make it hard for GNU/Linux to deal with. I think your tearing will be an nVidia issue - so might be worth looking for Wolfman's guides on nVidia issues - please take a look at his post-install guide that might help:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2054

Swarfendor437 wrote:Hi snydley100, Yes I think the OEM is a bit like NEC's 'glue' partition they had on their towers some years ago which is needed for the recovery partition to work - these things make it hard for GNU/Linux to deal with. I think your tearing will be an nVidia issue - so might be worth looking for Wolfman's guides on nVidia issues - please take a look at his post-install guide that might help:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2054

Oh, I was thinking that the OEM partition was for the GPT hard drive, where they keep the code for the UEFI bios code. I think all the Windows 8 computers have this, since Windows 8 requires UEFI and secure boot. I really don't know though, I'm still trying to figure all of this out.
Thanks for the link to Wolfman's Nvidia guide, I'm gonna go through the guide and see if I can fix the tearing issue with this computer.
Snyde

Found some interesting links for you:

http://ask-leo.com/what_are_these_parti ... drive.html

http://www.sevenforums.com/installation ... -what.html

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/thread ... -partition

You could look at Easeus todo backup home or Clonezilla to clone the entire drive to an external drive?