How to lose your hair quickly
A trip to Microcenter is a candy store-like experience with good customer service and great selection. I bought a brand-new Asus ROG Strix, despite the exquisitely obnoxious branding and lighting, for my next Linux box.
I was told that for warranty purposes, should anything occur and I need to bring the machine in for service, I’d have to re-install Windows first. So while making the backup restore media and setting up (a local account) I decided perhaps it’s best to dual boot.
The Interwebs told me to go with Fedora, and who am I to argue. So I made a boot thumb drive and took it for a spin. I used to use Balena Etcher but this time I went with Fedora’s Media Writer tool which worked well (but for Windows 10 users, autoplay might need to be switched off before writing the drive). I was impressed that there was even some limited lighting control out of the box.
But the ASUS problems started coming fast and furious. Top priority had been to flash the BIOS in order to remove the hideous “Republic of Gamers” boot loading logo, but alas, the tool for that was not available for my specific motherboard. Oh well; I shall have to just avert my eyes during the boot sequence for now.
Next up, I couldn’t access the main partition from inside the Fedora live preview; in disk management there was a little padlock icon and the word “Bitlocker.”
What in tarnation. Pretty sure I toggled that off during Windows setup, so I was a tad confused. Booting back into Windows settings, there was a button which said, “Turn on Bitlocker”. Now I was even more confused, because it sure seemed to be on already.
Apparently Bitlocker encryption is default on Windows 11. Under Windows “Privacy & security”, there is a toggle to turn off Device Encryption. Once I shut that off, it said “decrypting” for a few minutes, and then I was able to go back into Fedora live OS and access the drive.
Another hurdle: Fedora tells me “Not enough free space on selected disks.” Microsoft hogs 5 partitions full of goodness-knows what. So I toddle off into Windows Disk Management to resize the main partition. Guess what — due to unmovable files, the partition could only be shrunk to about 800GB (leaving only about 200 for Fedora).
It’s bedtime, so tomorrow I will delete some expendable-looking things, run Disk Cleanup, and defragment to see if that will help. But I’m starting to think it’s not worth all this hassle to dual boot.
To be continued…