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by Graham Williams
Duck Duck Go



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Olive Preparation

20190312 [olive]Olive came with MS/Windows 10 Home pre-installed. The Ubuntu versions of the XPS13 are not readily available everywhere. On booting Windows 10 we set up Wi-Fi and log in with a new Microsoft ecosystem user account. It is a good idea to create new user accounts with different email addresses (if you can) each time as a privacy guard and to monitor who shares your email and profile with who.

BIOS

When powering up the machine you can boot into the BIOS (Revision 1.0.0). I had to boot from a powered down state rather than a restart from Windows to get either F2 (BIOS) or F12 (Boot Menu) to take. Also holding the function key down on power on does not work—you need to continuously tap the function key. On boot, tapping F2 or F12 you will soon see a blue bar along the bottom to indicate it is going into the BIOS.

SATA RAID to AHCI

The default setup of the BIOS treats the SSD drive as a SATA RAID device. The SSD drive was not seen on booting into GNU/Linux. Instead we need to use SATA AHCI instead. To do so boot Windows into Safe Mode by opening a powershell and typing:

bcdedit /set '{current}' safeboot minimal
Power cycle the machine and boot into the BIOS by tapping F2 when powering up. Navigate to BIOS Setup and under System Configuration change SATA Operation from RAID to AHCI. Save this setting and reboot into Windows which will be in Safe Mode.Then disable Safe Mode with:
bcdedit /deletevevalue '{current}' safeboot
Reboot Windows again and this time it won't be in Safe Mode. Open the Device Manager and under Storage controllers confirm there is now a Standard NVM Express Controller.

Shrink C:

Whilst in Windows use the Disk Management utility to shrink the C: drive by choosing OS C: under Volume, and then under the right mouse button choose Shrink Volume. Shrink it down by 400 GB (409600 MB) resulting in this amount being unallocated leaving just 27GB free for Windows. This 400 GB will be used for GNU/Linux.


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