Preparation for Dual Boot

The device came with Windows 11 preinstalled. After finishing all steps in the Windows initial setup wizard - by the way, if you leave the wizard open for a while, the laptop will go to sleep - and you'll have to start over from the first step. Then installed all Windows updates. And after that, I ran the Create a recovery drive application. The drive was created, but there were a few concerns:

1. I'm not sure that the recovery USB drive will work.
2. I wanted to remove not required partitions. There were about 5 partitions. That was visible in the Windows integrated Disk Management
3. After that clean "factory made" Windows install, I could see that drive C used 165 GB but if I go inside the drive and select all files (without showing hidden files and hidden directories) can see that those files took only 57 GB.

I immediately started work on that. I had a RESTORE partition of 30 GB and the flash drive that should do the same thing. Since I still had 7 days to return the laptop (according to local customer protection law). I decided to test whether that drive could perform a fresh reinstallation. I restarted the laptop while holding the Shift button. I selected from the menu that I wanted to make a fresh start. During that process, there was a requirement to enter the BitLocker recovery key, https://aka.ms/myrecoverykey. That is strange too, because the version of Windows is Home and BitLocker usually comes with the Professional version. I checked online and it seems that some vendors are able to get certain Professional-only features on their devices with Home version of Windows. The Wizard notified that data will be lost and partition will also be changed. It took a while, and after that I was able to see only three partitions:

1. EFI,
2. Windows
3. Windows PE restoration

I removed the third partition since my USB flash drive could already do the same job. I resized the second partition in Disk Management. But in the partition with Windows I still had something strange. The question is: what took up more than 100 GB?

First I thought it was some kind of update optimization (hidden files helping Microsoft save on Azure hosting costs). But after checking via command line the problem became visible. I used cmd with administrator privileges (right click on Command Prompt icon and choose Run as administrator).

C: disk is disk with Windows and output was

There are a few files taking up space hiberfil.sys at ~53 GB and used for hibernation. and 16 GB for swapfile.sys. To be clear, I was trying to free up some space in order to keep Windows in case I needed it to make an update the UEFI and firmware for other hardware devices, test performance of some applications on Windows, maybe play a few games (okay, mostly for games). And if it takes too much space on its own, I will move that installation onto an external USB disk. But it looks like Windows assumes 128 GB of RAM won't be enough for me and adds an additional swap file and thinks it's a good idea to hibernate RAM to disk only to save some power. I didn't like either option.

I reduced the swap to 2 GB rather than turning it off entirely, just to maintain some compatibility. I believe that will reduce the chance of unexpected issues though it could likely be disabled entirely. I navigated to

Settings > System > About > Advanced system settings (under Device info section) > Advanced tab > Performance section, button Settings > Advanced tab > Virtual memory section, button Change.

(How many sections with the same name? It seems that after such interfaces you can very quickly find yourself wanting to switch to use the command line.)

Then I set a custom size and entered 16 MB as the minimum size and 2048 MB as the maximum. Then click Set, and then OK, Apply. And then restart.

To disable hibernation at the command line with admin privileges, type the following:

The final step is to run Disk Cleanup > Clean up system files. Then select in Files to delete everything there was about 12 GB of delivery updates optimization and click OK.

The result is okay, only 87 GB is filled with files. But probably there are some files that could be cleaned. But I think that is enough for now.

I thought I had done everything needed to install OpenSUSE Tumbleweed from a thumb drive. I encountered an issue during installation:

YaST2
Error
Cannot enroll authentication:
Command `[["/usr/bin/sdbootutil", "enroll", "--method=tpm2+pin","--devices=/dev/nvme0n1p4"]]`.
Error output: ERROR: No Free space in /boot/efi for new kernel

I checked the size of the EFI partition and it's only 100MB. But previously I never had the same error. I checked the installation configuration, which I hadn't changed, and it seemed it had started using a different bootloader by default. And it required more space.

Because Windows integrated Disk Management has limitations about rearranging partitions, I used GParted live USB. I slightly moved a partition to free up 4 GB (for future flexibility) of unallocated space right behind the EFI partition. Then I tried to increase the size and format the EFI partition via GParted but got an error. The Windows RE on the previously created flash drive came in handy.

1. During boot process choose Command Prompt
2. I located, removed, and recreated the EFI partition
3. Rebuilt the EFI Bootloader

I haven't saved the exact commands that I ran. Those were handy:

• diskpart
• bcdboot

1. More free space even with two operating systems than before
2. Confirmed that the Recovery Drive works
3. A larger EFI partition that is ready for future experiments

Eventually, I managed to set it up without any issues:

1. Dual boot of Windows 11 and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
2. OpenSUSE installed on LVM with LUKS encryption
3. New bootloader supports TPM2 + PIN so no need to type a long password and a short PIN is enough to boot the laptop if there are no changes in hardware.