Installing Fedora 21 Dual Boot with Windows 8

Fedora is an open source operating system, which is based on Linux kernel developed and it’s supported by RedHat. Fedora’s default desktop is GNOME environment with default interface GNOME Shell, Fedora have other desktop environments including KDE, MATE, Xfce, LXDE and Cinnamon.

Fedora 21 Dual Boot Windows 8
Fedora 21 Dual Boot Windows 8

Fedora available for different platforms such as x86_64, Power-PC,IA-32, ARM. Fedora workstation is very user friendly for every users, It can be installed in any desktop or Laptop, It can be used for developments, and much professional level. Two months ago on 9th December 2014, Fedora team released its new version called Fedora 21, and next version of Fedora 22 will be scheduled to released in mid 2015. Read Also:

  1. Fedora 21 Workstation Installation Guide
  2. 18 Things to Do After Installing Fedora 21 Workstation
  3. Fedora 21 Server Installation Guide

This quick guide will walk through the installation of Fedora 21 Workstation edition in dual-boot with Windows 8 on the same machine on the same hard drive.

System Requirements

To install Fedora 21 in dual-boot mode with Windows 8, the following minimum requirements should meet.

  1. Minimum 1 GHz Processor.
  2. Minimum 1 GB RAM.
  3. At least 40GB Hard disk with Unallocated space.
  4. Graphics supports with Direct x 9.

Before installing Fedora 21, you must have working Windows 8 installation, as it’s always good practice to install Linux after Windows installation and also make sure you must leave one Partition with Unallocated space for Linux (Fedora 21) installation.

Fedora 21 Installation with Dual Boot on Windows 8

1. After installing Windows 8, go the official Fedora download page to Download Fedora 21 Workstation iso image and burn it into CD/DVD or UDB device and reboot your machine to boot the system with Fedora 21 Live media.

Boot Fedora 21 Live
Boot Fedora 21 Live

2. After booting, you will get the option ‘Try Fedora‘ to explore Fedora 21 before installing on the hard drive, or else you can choose ‘Install to Hard Drive‘ option to install Fedora 21 on the machine.

Choose Fedora 21 Installation
Choose Fedora 21 Installation

3. Choose the language for your installation process.

Choose Fedora 21 Language
Choose Fedora 21 Language

4. In this step, we need to define our Installation Destination. For choosing the install destination click on Install Destination in left side which marked with exclamation Symbol.

Select Fedora 21 Install Destination
Select Fedora 21 Install Destination

5. By default Fedora will choose the free space to get install the OS, because we have already left Unallocated space for Linux installation. Let me choose the advance partition setup for Linux install, For that we have to choose “I will Configure partitioning” and click on Done in top left corner for next step.

Select Fedora 21 Install Drive
Select Fedora 21 Install Drive

6. At bottom left corner, you can see Available Space with 20.47GB for Fedora 21 installation.

Manual Partition Selection for Fedora 21
Manual Partition Selection for Fedora 21

7. Choose the Partition scheme from Drop down menu and choose Standard Partition. Here you can see the already installed windows partitions.

Select Standard Partition
Select Standard Partition

8. Select the “Available Space” and click on ‘+‘ sign to create /boot, / and swap mount points for fedora installation.

  1. /boot size 500MB
  2. /swap size 1GB
  3. / partition leave blank, because we’re using all available space.
Create Boot Partition
Create Boot Partition
Create Swap Partition
Create Swap Partition
Create root Partition
Create root Partition

After creating all above three partitions, choose the file-system type as “ext4” for the Fedora installation.

Select Filesystem Type
Select Filesystem Type

Click on Accept changes to configure the partition defined in above steps.

Installation Summary
Installation Summary

9. Now you can see the Installation Destination was completes successfully and click on ‘Begin Installation‘ to start installation process.

Partition Table Summary
Partition Table Summary

10. During installation process, you need to set a root password and also create a user or skip it.

Set root Password
Set root Password
Create New User
Create New User

11. Click on Quit to reboot the machine after the Installation completes, at bottom you can see that Fedora is now Successfully installed and ready to use.

Fedora 21 Installation Finishes
Fedora 21 Installation Finishes

12. After system rebooting, you will see the Dual boot menu option for Fedora 21 and Windows 8, Choose Fedora 21 to boot the system into fedora desktop.

Dual Boot Options
Dual Boot Options
Fedora 21 Desktop
Fedora 21 Desktop

13. Now verify the partition, which we’ve defined for Linux and already existing windows partition by choosing Disk from Fedora Search bar.

Verify Partition Table
Verify Partition Table

Here is the summary of dual-boot partition table for both Windows 8 and Fedora 21. That means we’ve successfully installed the Dual boot with Windows 8 and Fedora 21. To use Windows, you need to reboot and choose the window from GRUB Menu.

Conclusion

Here we have seen how to install Fedora 21 and Windows 8 with multi-boot option in a single Drive. Many of us, wonder how to install multi-boot with Linux. Hope this guide will help you to setup your dual boot machine in very quick way. Any query regarding above Setups? Feel free to leave your comments below, we will get back to you with solution to your comments.

Babin Lonston
I'm Working as a System Administrator for last 10 year's with 4 years experience with Linux Distributions, fall in love with text based operating systems.

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6 thoughts on “Installing Fedora 21 Dual Boot with Windows 8”

  1. there’s an error ‘local variable ‘e’ referenced before assignment’ when i’m gonna add a new partition, how do i fix it?

    Reply
  2. Is There any possiblity ..that in dual boot system

    GRUB(booting both OS) get replaced with UEFI (boot on windows)??

    IF Yes,please tell me how to resolve this issue…??

    Reply
  3. hi,
    i have done dual booted centos7 with WINDOWS8 …for sometime it works and i am able to boot in both OS from bootmenu

    but after sometime i only boot into windows8

    i think might be because of windows update the GRUB is replaced with windows8 boot menu…can u tell me how to solve this problem???

    Reply

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