Couple things that I hope help you out. One that's saved my tail more than once is keep that original hard drive if you can. Probably not covered under a long warranty, but you said it belongs to your gf... so just drop $X dollars on a $Y brand SSD and start fresh. If she doesn't like it then you can always go back, no problem. Use the drive for something else in that case. Believe me, you don't want to sweat your way through the install, and bugs happen.

Asking for help is a great way to figure out the specifics, and I know it can be intimidating. I say that with the most sincere tone (text doesn't really help me here...) My first jump into a Linux install, up from a VM (no laughing), I managed to completely wipe whatever boot partition I had on the other OS at the time. True story. Backups? lol. Right.

The community that will know the specifics best about Antergos is them. I've heard great things and they seem to be very responsive. I can also personally recommend the Solus team. N other responses will yield N^2 recommendations, so be prepared. :)

Good luck and of course let us know how it goes, and be sure to add your stats to the community stats page!

Quoting: saildataCouple things that I hope help you out. One that's saved my tail more than once is keep that original hard drive if you can. Probably not covered under a long warranty, but you said it belongs to your gf... so just drop $X dollars on a $Y brand SSD and start fresh. If she doesn't like it then you can always go back, no problem. Use the drive for something else in that case. Believe me, you don't want to sweat your way through the install, and bugs happen.

Asking for help is a great way to figure out the specifics, and I know it can be intimidating. I say that with the most sincere tone (text doesn't really help me here...) My first jump into a Linux install, up from a VM (no laughing), I managed to completely wipe whatever boot partition I had on the other OS at the time. True story. Backups? lol. Right.

The community that will know the specifics best about Antergos is them. I've heard great things and they seem to be very responsive. I can also personally recommend the Solus team. N other responses will yield N^2 recommendations, so be prepared. :)

Good luck and of course let us know how it goes, and be sure to add your stats to the community stats page!

Hey saildata, thanks for your reply first of all! I updated the post, managed to install the OS myself with purging everything from the flash memory. I needed Gnome desktop because the laptop supports touchscreen and Unity and Gnome are the only options for me in that regard.

I first thought about replacing the SSD but the problem is her laptop has some sort of flash memory that works as fast as SSD but isn't phisically an ssd that can be replaced. So that wasn't really an option.

Secondly I took some risk and changed the boot mode of installed OS to Legacy instead of UEFI because I'm more used to work with legacy boot and will help me to manage her laptop in the future.

Luckily enough Antergos installed without any errors and boot partition is recognized by the BIOS. A few weeks earlier I had a laptop with BIOS that wouldn't recognize anything but Windows UEFI bootloader so OS installed without errors but later failed to boot and couldn't get it working.

Quoting: MaCroX95

Quoting: saildataCouple things that I hope help you out. One that's saved my tail more than once is keep that original hard drive if you can. Probably not covered under a long warranty, but you said it belongs to your gf... so just drop $X dollars on a $Y brand SSD and start fresh. If she doesn't like it then you can always go back, no problem. Use the drive for something else in that case. Believe me, you don't want to sweat your way through the install, and bugs happen.

Asking for help is a great way to figure out the specifics, and I know it can be intimidating. I say that with the most sincere tone (text doesn't really help me here...) My first jump into a Linux install, up from a VM (no laughing), I managed to completely wipe whatever boot partition I had on the other OS at the time. True story. Backups? lol. Right.

The community that will know the specifics best about Antergos is them. I've heard great things and they seem to be very responsive. I can also personally recommend the Solus team. N other responses will yield N^2 recommendations, so be prepared. :)

Good luck and of course let us know how it goes, and be sure to add your stats to the community stats page!

Hey saildata, thanks for your reply first of all! I updated the post, managed to install the OS myself with purging everything from the flash memory. I needed Gnome desktop because the laptop supports touchscreen and Unity and Gnome are the only options for me in that regard.

I first thought about replacing the SSD but the problem is her laptop has some sort of flash memory that works as fast as SSD but isn't phisically an ssd that can be replaced. So that wasn't really an option.

Secondly I took some risk and changed the boot mode of installed OS to Legacy instead of UEFI because I'm more used to work with legacy boot and will help me to manage her laptop in the future.

Luckily enough Antergos installed without any errors and boot partition is recognized by the BIOS. A few weeks earlier I had a laptop with BIOS that wouldn't recognize anything but Windows UEFI bootloader so OS installed without errors but later failed to boot and couldn't get it working.

You are very welcome! I'm glad it worked out OK in the end. I've honestly never heard of a SSD like that, except for maybe something that Apple made.

If the machine is 100% Linux, you're probably home free now - just normal update/backup as usual. If it is dual booted then make sure any important items on the Linux partition are backed up more often as there have been many reports of the other OS wiping out the Linux partition "by accident" during their update process. :S:

Good luck!

It's a shame I didn't reply to this before you did the Linux install.

You could have used CloneZilla and an external USB hard drive to make a Backup Clone of the original Windows hard drive. Usually compressed clone images are a lot smaller than the hard drive on which they are installed. For instance, a 128GB Windows 10 install might fill up 40GB of clone image.

Then if things didn't work out with the Linux installs, you could revert the original hard drive with the clone image and get everything back exactly how it was.

(It is also quite good to do this after completing a Linux install, so if you mess things up later on, you just connect the clone backup drive and restore the clone image onto the internal drive.)

I suppose the laptop still has the Windows serial key somewhere, so you could get back the OS the long way. =P

Another little note - Although it isn't something I really do, something I do think about from time to time - dual-booting different versions of Linux on the same machine. You could do this quite easily and keep using the same home directory across the distributions. (Also, with some pain and effort, a Windows install can be set to dual-boot with Linux on the same drive.)

Quoting: g000hIt's a shame I didn't reply to this before you did the Linux install.

You could have used CloneZilla and an external USB hard drive to make a Backup Clone of the original Windows hard drive. Usually compressed clone images are a lot smaller than the hard drive on which they are installed. For instance, a 128GB Windows 10 install might fill up 40GB of clone image.

Then if things didn't work out with the Linux installs, you could revert the original hard drive with the clone image and get everything back exactly how it was.

(It is also quite good to do this after completing a Linux install, so if you mess things up later on, you just connect the clone backup drive and restore the clone image onto the internal drive.)

I suppose the laptop still has the Windows serial key somewhere, so you could get back the OS the long way. =P

Another little note - Although it isn't something I really do, something I do think about from time to time - dual-booting different versions of Linux on the same machine. You could do this quite easily and keep using the same home directory across the distributions. (Also, with some pain and effort, a Windows install can be set to dual-boot with Linux on the same drive.)

Hey man, thanks for the reply, it's cool to know about CloneZilla :D I don't think that we are going to need Windows license anymore, but if she needed it and we couldn't find the key I'd give her mine because I don't use it on any PC. The laptop is now rocking Antergos with Gnome and works very well and looks very nice, also touchscreen support is nice!