User:Barbs/SSD Maintenance & Dual Booting

Welcome to my liveblog on taking care of my 5,5 year old laptop!!

I own a Lenovo IdeaPad Gaming 3 which I bought in 2020 and somehow still runs really well. For the past few months I've been thinking about running some maintenance on it to make it last even longer. Things I want to do:

• ✅ Install a new 1 TB SSD. My current one is 500GB, which is too little space for me especially if I want to...
• ✅ Dual boot Linux next to Windows. Sadly I can't let go of Windows completely as I need it for drawing software, but I would really love to switch to Linux for all other work I do!
• ⬜ If all goes well, repurpose the original SSD into additional storage, maybe one that I can access through both OS’es?
• ⬜ Fix overheating problems. Sometimes when I game my graphics card overheats I think ? and everything starts lagging. So I want to see if I can clean its insides and check if the cooling paste needs replacing.

Upgrading the SSD

Cloning the original SSD to a larger new one

The cloning finished in 00:31:41!

To do this I'm using:

• My laptop with the old SSD still inside
• The new SSD
• An M.2 SSD enclosure so I can connect the new SSD externally using USB-C
• The trial version of Macrium Reflext X Home

First I installed the new SSD inside of the external enclosure. It took me a while to figure out how to do it as I had never handled an SSD before, but watching a video helped me realize I had to press the SSD into the socket from an angle ??? which felt so wrong and scary who thought this was a good idea. I then connected the enclosure to my laptop through a USB-C cable and launched Macrium.

From here on out I'm following this tutorial specifically.

Before starting the cloning process in Macrium (following the tutorial's instructions), one of the comments suggested changing the advanced settings from making an "intelligent copy" to a "forensic copy", which makes sure it will clone every single thing stored on the source SSD instead of picking and choosing things. I think. It sounds better anyways.

Opening up my laptop for the first time!

my laptop’s innards

Shoutout to this iFixIt article which details exactly what I need to do for my specific laptop model! I recommend searching for the maintenance manual of your laptop as well.

Prying open the laptop felt pretty scary. After unscrewing everything I had to pry open like 10 latches, for which I didn’t have the proper tools. A card was too thick so in the end I used a guitar pick which did the job!

Before (left) & after (right) of making my laptop fans dust-free

Once inside the first thing I did was unplug the battery. I didn’t have the tools the ifixit article describes and it took some force to wiggle it out of the socket, so I used a Nintendo 3DS stylus as a tool which sufficed perfectly!

I noticed it was sooooo dusty! I used a makeup brush to clean away all the dust. The fans were completely clogged up by dust, and I hope cleaning them out will help the overheating issue I also wanted to fix. This process was super satisfying.

Next it was time to swap the SSD’s! This process was fairly straightforward. Unscrew the old one, take it out, place the new one and screw it back in. I also replaced the original heatpad with a new one that came with my external ssd enclosure.

After that I plugged in the battery again, closed the laptop back up, tested if it would still power on (it did!), before screwing back on all the screws!

Upon booting into Windows, everything looked the exact same as I left it on the previous SSD, but with double the storage! I made sure to update the SSD's drivers too.

Dualbooting Windows & Linux

After pondering this for a while and also talking with Tommi, I decided on Fedora KDE as my distro. I chose KDE over Gnome because I prefer a Windows-like desktop with lots of customizability options :)
Important to note is that I'm still using Windows 10 (as in the EU they're continuing support for a year still), so if you're on Windows 11 these steps might look a little different, although the tutorial I link later on is on Windows 11!

You will need:

• Your laptop/pc
• An empty USB stick
• The ISO file of the linux distro you want to install, mine was Fedora KDE
• Rufus

For this section I mainly referenced this tutorial.
I had previously done a clean install of Linux Mint on an old laptop, so a lot of the installation steps were already familiar to me. The only thing I had to figure out was the dual booting, which I was quite nervous about as I’d heard some horror story gossips around the studio. In the end everything turned out perfect!

Preparing the USB

• Launch Rufus
• Set Device to your USB stick drive
• Set Boot Selection to the .iso file you just installed
• Press Start
  • If you get a pop up asking which mode to write to, select Write in ISO Image mode
• Wait for the process to complete

Partitioning the SSD

• Right click on Start menu and go to Disk Management. This application shows all your drives and their partitions.
• Take note of how large your SSD is and how much free space it has. You're going to allocate some of that free space to a new partition which will become used by Linux.
• On the partition labeled C:, right-click and select Shrink volume..
• Besides "Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB", enter the size you want your Linux partition to be in total.
• Close Disk Management.

Disabling Fast Startup

Fast startup is a feature in Windows that allows your startup to be faster (lol) by hibernating some off the booting process instead of turning it on from scratch every time you boot up Windows. This can conflict with dualbooting, so it's important to turn it off beforehand.

• Open Control Panel.
• Click on Hardware and Sound.
• Click on Power Options.
• Click the "Choose what the power button does" option.
• Click the "Change settings that are currently unavailable" option.
• Uncheck the "Turn on fast startup" option under the "Shutdown settings" section.
• Click the Save changes button.

Boot from the USB drive

• Restart your computer.
• During the initial startup screen, press ESC, F1, F2, F8 or F10.
• When you choose to enter BIOS Setup, the setup utility page will appear.
• Using the arrow keys on your keyboard, select the BOOT tab.
• Move USB to be first in the boot sequence.

Installing Linux

At some point during your distro's installation steps (at least for Fedora and Mint) it will see that Windows is installed on this computer and ask you to either install Linux alongside Windows Boot Manager (resulting in a dualboot), or erase Windows and only install Linux. Make sure to choose the former!

When you next restart your computer, you will enter the GRUB menu. Use the arrow keys to boot the Linux installation (you should see the Windows one in the list as well).

Loading screen freezes while booting up Linux

This was the only time I ran into a problem, the bootloader worked just fine, but when I selected to boot Fedora it would get stuck on the loading screen. At first I thought it was just the first-time startup that was taking a while, but after waiting like half an hour I figured there was another problem.

If you press ESC while booting up, it will show what's going on behind the scenes. Based on what it showed me, I did some searching online and came to the conclusion my graphics drivers and NVIDIA GPU were interfering with the boot-up process somehow.
The solution was:

• In GRUB, while highlighting Fedora, hit the e key to edit the command.
• Add nomodeset to the command. This tells the kernel to not start the video drivers until the system is up and running.
• For me, this allowed Fedora to boot properly. I immediately updated the system and installed the most recent graphics driver and had no issues since then!!

Overheating & Performance

So far I've noticed that my laptop is dead silent while I'm booted into Linux, but once I boot into Windows the fans start whirring like crazy. There are a lot of background processes going on in Windows that are limiting my performance there, and I want to try cleaning it all up bit it's SO DIFFICULT FOR NO REASON.