Before things get too political, I'm going to hijack Gregg's thread a bit and talk about my latest project: dual-booting a brand-new Toshiba P55t-B5154 with Win 8.1 and Mint 17 KDE.
So far the going is easy, since I only did this with a Satellite S55t what, a year and a half ago. I've had to log into Windows so often these last couple days, I almost have the password memorized now. :/
So, anyway, I have got Windows up and running, created a Recovery drive ($9 16GB USB drive from Wal-mart), shrunk the primary volume, then restarted into the Toshiba Setup Utility for UEFI and turned off Secure Boot.
I have Mint 17.1 on a (mint colored, coincidentally) 4GB USB drive, and booted up. Since this is KDE, and the KDE Partition Manager is unfamiliar (and uncooperative), I opened up a terminal as root and installed my preferred tool:
Code:
apt-get install gparted
This is a Live iteration of the OS still, so that won't stick around after I reboot the machine. Sometimes that kind of thing can be convenient.
I used gparted to squeeze the Windows volume down even further (it's been my observation that Windows will only shrink down to half the capacity of the volume it started with), I don't need a 1TB volume, but gave it a generous 500GB (too generous, but I have plenty of space on a 2TB drive) and used the space I just freed up for a 500GB (NTFS) data volume to share between my two OSs.
I then created 200GB root and /home partitions (and swap-- don't forget swap) for my Mint install, and began the installation process.
The reason why I created the Recovery drive is insurance against me accidentally overwriting my Windows volume, because I do need to have that for work on occasion (or when I want to take a day off unexpectedly... damn you Silverlight). Also, shrinking a volume using gparted is not without risk...
So... this was the easy part. Next I am going to install rEFInd and try and make this dual-boot setup compatible with Secure Boot. Because I am both stupid and a glutton for punishment.