New laptop, new install method, Windows 7 to Fedora 12
I'm going to document my steps of taking a brand new HP dv7 laptop and getting Fedora 12 installed dual-booted with Windows 7. This will be a "live" blog which I'll be updating throughout the day as I move data over from my HP dv9000 which is going to go off to HP for warranty support at the end of the day.
A little background
First, I've had the HP dv9000 for just under 2 years. It is a nice laptop, and I'd buy another for a decent price if it would still have a full 2 year warranty, etc. But the problem is that if you pick up an HP dv9000 now, you'll be getting a refurb and at best 90 days of warranty. Seemed a littlle risky to me. In the end I decided not to go the refurb route on the laptop. With hindsight, I'd say that's good advice for laptops as they just endure a lot of abuse unless they've been used 100% as a desktop and not been traveling. I should credit my wife, Angela, with the advice to skip the refurb, actually, as my frugal side was going to go the cheap route, which may have been more costly long-term.
One of my requirements is that I need a wide screen with high resolution to be productive with my workflow. Many of the new model laptops are only 14" or 15", and I've been used to the 17" widescreen for some time. Further, I need high resolution, specifically 1440+ in width, and many of the newer smaller displays are less than this (1280x800, or 1366x768), and that just slows me down, both in technical work and in processing paperwork and being able to see two or three app windows at a time.
I'm also a little picky in that I want an nVidia GPU and not ATI or generic Intel. My preference is an AMD over Intel for the CPU, but it is not a requirement. It seems currently the pairing is nVidia with Intel, and ATI with AMD, so I can't have exactly what I want, and the GPU is more important for driver support than CPU, so it is the deciding factor. This HP dv7t has an nVidia GeForce, and I'll get into the specs later on as I get the 3D drivers working.
Lastly, I really prefer to purchase through Costco. 90 days no hassle return policy, and Then 2 years HP warranty. I buy with my American Express card, so I get an extra 1 year should things break outside of the manufacturer warranty. I've been very happy with this so far.
Here is the model I bought (no longer available at Costco.com): HP dv7t. Mine has an "expresso black" color scheme, not grey.
Windows 7
This time I decided not to format my entire drive and install Fedora. This took considerably more work, but I wanted to have Windows 7 available for testing for customers.
First of all, I never turned on my laptop until I could back up the hard drive as it came from the factory. I used a LiveUSB boot drive to boot up Fedora 12, and used dd to do a sector by sector copy of the drive. Specifically I used dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -9 > /media/1tb/backup/hpdv7t.gz
Next, I booted to Windows 7 and went through the defaults, but never let it go online. I removed all trial software (Norton, Office) and software I'll never use (Works) and others. Then I disabled System Restore, which was required for the next step. I used System Defrag to move all files to the beginning of the partition, and the Shrink option to reduce the 450GB partition to 60GB, still leaving 10GB free for patches Windows would need and 20GB for a future step. While this was running I was disabling all scheduled/automated software, but this isn't a requirement.
Once this was done, I booted back up to my LiveUSB Fedora 12 image. The problem I ran into is that the drive ships with 4 primary partitions. A hard drive can have no more primary partitions than this. I could not delete the SYSTEM partition with the Windows 7 boot loader, nor the "C:" partition where Windows 7 lived. My only remaining options were to delete the RECOVERY and HP_TOOLS partitions. I created folders with these names and copied all the contents in, as well as creating files with the fdisk -l information that I'd need to recreate them should I need to. But really if I was going to go that route, I'd just dd back the factory image that the laptop came with. Once the contents were moved, I deleted RECOVERY and HP_TOOLS. RECOVERY was nearly 18GB, which is why I left the extra 20GB free when resizing "C:" in the previous steps.
Fedora 12 Install
Now that I had reduced the drive to 2 primary partions, I could install Fedora. I needed one primary partition for /boot (which I might have been able to skip, but this is not the recommened path, so I don't want to forge along on my own there), and one extended partition for LVM and all the Logical Volumes it would contain.
From the LiveUSB it was only a matter of minutes (less than 5) and Fedora 12 was installed on the hard drive and booted. I think it actually too longer to format the 400+GB of free space than to copy over Fedora 12.
The LiveUSB image I had was rather simple. It didn't have all the wireless drivers available, and in hindsight I may fix that, but then again I probably won't until the next time it comes to create a new LiveUSB image. The biggest hassle was that I had no wireless when I booted to Fedora 12, and I didn't want to get off the couch to go connect the ethernet.
I needed to find out what the chipset was for the wireless:
su -c "lspci -v"
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 4239 (rev 35)
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 1311
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 36
Memory at da100000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Capabilities: [c8] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [d0] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [e0] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 00-23-14-ff-ff-79-db-a8
Kernel driver in use: iwlagn
Kernel modules: iwlagn
Still not much help, so I scanned dmesg for iwlagn:
su -c "dmesg | grep iwlagn"
iwlagn: Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link AGN driver for Linux, 1.3.27kds
iwlagn: Copyright(c) 2003-2009 Intel Corporation
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Detected Intel Wireless WiFi Link 6000 Series 2x2 AGN REV=0x74
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: Tunable channels: 13 802.11bg, 24 802.11a channels
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: irq 36 for MSI/MSI-X
phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-agn-rs'
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: firmware: requesting iwlwifi-6000-4.ucode
iwlagn 0000:02:00.0: loaded firmware version 9.193.4.1
Registered led device: iwl-phy0::radio
Registered led device: iwl-phy0::assoc
Registered led device: iwl-phy0::RX
Registered led device: iwl-phy0::TX
I used my USB drive to connect to my HP dv9000 and yumdownload iwl6000-firmware and sneakernetted it to my new HP dv7t, as well as the latest kernel and kernel-firmware. I then rebooted, and wireless was working great.
I'll continue to document and fill in the details, especially of the windows steps, later on today.
