I must confess, that I try not to run Windows any type of more than absolutely necessary. however for many reasons, it is sometimes necessary. In particular, I have had a number of laptops that are finicky with Linux. I still usually double boot them, however I frequently leave Windows on them for one reason or another. I just recently bought a new Dell Inspiron as well as the process of double booting it [turned out to be] unusually efficient however did bring up a few challenges.

If you ever desired a appropriate dual-booting laptop, you’ll be thinking about exactly how this configuration works. Sure, you can always repartition the drive, however the laptop has a fairly little drive as well as is set up extremely particularly to work with the BIOS diagnostics as well as healing so it is always a pain to redo the drive without upsetting the factory tools.

Since the laptop came with a 512 GB NVMe drive, I wished to upgrade the drive anyway. So one choice would have been to put a bigger drive in as well as then go the typical route. That was really my intention, however I wound up going a different way.

Bad News, great News

Oddly enough, this all worked out since I damaged the backlight on the very first Dell that I bought. I had the prolonged warranty, as well as after each “fix” it was returned in even worse shape. I escalated the support situation as well as they offered to just provide me a new computer. The catch was that they didn’t have the precise design I had, so they offered me an upgrade to an Inspiron 5510 — a bigger screen than the old one and, together with that, a fancier keyboard as well as bigger battery. however there was one other key feature.

That feature? double NVMe slots. I didn’t recognize this machine had double slots up until I cracked the situation open. There is a secondary short slot (2230) as well as a main slot that can fit a 2280 (long) gadget or a 2230. The stock drive was a short system in the main slot. You’d believe you might just put in one more short gadget or flip them around. You can, however it isn’t just that easy.

One M.2 slot is under the fan as well as there is one more short slot to the right of the battery.
I wished to put in a 2 TB drive of the longer type factor, so I elected to move the short drive to the short slot. That was easy, as well as the machine did boot up without any issues. I opened the BIOS to see what settings may apply to having two drives as well as discovered something interesting. The default BIOS configuration was for RAID. I suppose Dell figured if you have one drive you don’t care as well as if you have two drives, you would most likely like them to show up as a single larger drive.

Of course, a different brand laptop may not be configuration this way, however it is worth checking. I was anxious that altering the mode would render the difficult drive unusable. A quick browse showed that some people had altered it as well as were not able to boot Windows again. However, there was likewise a fix.

RAID No more (and Bitlocker Woes)

The technique is to very first boot into Windows in raid mode as well as utilize MSCONFIG to choose that the next boot should be in risk-free mode. then reboot, go into the BIOS as well as choose the typical disk configuration. Reboot into Windows risk-free mode. Windows will notice the disk system altered as well as put in the right drivers with bit or no comment. then run MSCONFIG once again to turn off risk-free mode. The system then booted nicely.

The other thing that made me anxious was that the drive had Bitlocker encryption turned on. I’m not sure if Dell shipped it that method or if Windows 11 decided to encrypt the drive. Again, you don’t truly get told about it unless you understand where to look, as well as it is difficult to opt out of it.

If your drive is encrypted, make sure you understand exactly how to get your secrets now. The simplest method is to log into your Microsoft account and, in theory, all machines linked to your account should be there together with healing keys. As I would discover out, though, this isn’t always the case, so great concept to save a copy on paper or a USB drive, too.

Installation

Bracket directions from the service manual.
The next task was to set up the new 2 TB drive. Again, you may have a different set of problems, however in my case, there is a bit threaded bracket that installs the motherboard to accept the drive screw as well as it was in the setting for a short NVMe drive. eliminating it took a bit of effort, as well as then I had to push it back into one more bracket to in shape a long drive. The service handbook explains it all. The bracket utilizes spring tension so it took a bit force, however not as well much.

I discovered a nice guide for upgrading precisely this computer on YouTube. If you are working on a different laptop, it may pay to browse for something similar.

With the drive installed aswell as the back loosely attached, I was happy to see the BIOS acknowledged the drive without any problems.

Send in the Clones

There are many methods to clone a Windows drive. I utilized Macrium show which has a free tier that is all you requirement for this task. Honestly, you should truly back things up before doing surgical treatment like this, however I will confess that I didn’t. As a practical matter, I didn’t have anything on there that I couldn’t stand to lose.

Reflect is able to immediately broaden the Windows partition as it clones as well as it likewise takes off encryption on the copy. kind of. The copy went fine, however it turns out Windows 11 immediately encrypts a drive when it notes that is possible — at least, by default. Luckily, I figured this out as well as printed out the new encryption key. However, this will turn out to not be as wise as it sounds.

Boot to the Head

Of course, contemporary UEFI booting isn’t as simple as the old-fashioned kind, so a reboot after the clone still put me on the old drive as well as forcing a boot with the BIOS did get me prompted for the decryption key one time. feeling delighted with myself, I threw away the printout of the decryption key however before I did, I tore it up. After all, now that Windows booted, it would be in my account, right?

You can assumption this was a poor assumption on my part. Here’s what I should have done: I should have disabled the old drive in the BIOS as well as tested rebooting without it. That’s what you should do. That’s not what I did. Turns out, the BIOS was still booting from the UEFI partition on the old drive as well as redirecting to the new drive. So formatting the old drive made the computer stop working to boot with the usual secret non-specific error code as well as meaningless log data entries. I might boot Linux from a USB drive however with whatever encrypted, it wasn’t simple to figure out what to do.

Booting a Windows repair work disk was fine, however it needed the decryption key that was in pieces at the bottom of the trash. My Microsoft account still showed the old key for the original difficult drive. Luckily, even though it was trash day, the garbage truck hadn’t made it to me yet, so I went dumpster diving for the pieces of my key. With the key, the startup repair work still couldn’t repair everything. however at least I might boot to a command timely as well as run the usual commands. Finally, I had a bootable system.

No Account

Unfortunately, the Microsoft account problem persisted. There seemed to be no method to force the key to save. The Web declares there is an choice to save the key to the account, however in Windows 11 house edition with the automatic encryption, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The response was to eliminate the Microsoft accounts from the machine as well as then re-enroll the accounts. I suspect this may not have been a issue if I had not had several accounts associated, however who knows?

In all fairness, this wasn’t a crucial issue as long as you keep your secrets backed up anyway (which I don’t). however it was strange that it just quietly encrypted the drive as well as then failed to store the secrets for you.

After that, installing Linux to the original drive went fine. GRUB, of course, can quickly boot the machine in whatever configuration you like, as well as is simple to change. You have to do all the usual double boot stuff like set your Linux clock to regional time so you don’t get the time confused on each reboot.

TLDR

If you prefer a short summary:

Some laptops have two drive slots so you can utilize one for Linux. look for that choice if you’re interested.

Your laptop may have raid configured by default

Booting a cloned copy of Windows has some challenges

Windows 11 may encrypt your drive without telling you as well as not save the healing key to your Microsoft account

In the end, though, everything worked out as well as now I have my option of operating environments. Linux discovered the audio, network, as well as camera without any problems. It helps, too, that the 5510 is quite vanilla as well as doesn’t have things like detachable screens as well as rotation sensors that frequently confuse Linux on other laptops.

Of course, you might just wipe whatever as well as set up Linux or do a traditional double boot setup. Or develop your own laptop as well as do what you want. You can even do that with a Raspberry Pi.