Tonight, my main goal is just to get through the Files/Tools Needed section to have everything ready to go. I have read through the entire guide to make sure I have an idea of what I’m getting myself into. For background: I have imaged Android tablets back in the day with community built ROMs and I have manually partitioned hard drives for various multi-boot setups, but it’s been a minute (or decade) since I last did any of that. I have never attempted all of it all at once like I’ll have to for this project, but I can follow tutorials, so maybe this will work.
It’s mostly downloading things, but in the middle of everything is using UUPMediaCreator to build your install image. This required following a tutorial to use terminal commands to run the program that downloads and builds the image. One of the steps requires typing in the rather long name of the downloaded folder. Tab-autocomplete is your friend.
The download went smoothly and quickly (thanks gym wifi!). The ISO build sat at 47% for probably 20 minutes. I contemplated scrapping the process and restarting it, but luckily had other things to distract myself with until it magically started making progress again. The install.wim file you’re trying to create clocks in at 3.5GB.
I may continue into the Steps tonight. Unlocking the bootloader should be nbd, but I’m not sure I want to try to make the partitions while I’m out.
OMG I just went to the guide and you are warned six times that " Parted is a very delicate tool, anything you do may cause permanent damage to your device"
Parted is a very literal tool. It will do exactly what you tell it to do. At the disk level. Typos have consequences. I’ll try that tomorrow. Hopefully before the kids get up. Partitioning is not scary as long as you mean what you type. Measure twice, cut once and all.
Oh no! You just eliminated one of my reasons for not doing this experiment!
Another thing I just realized that the Duo Uno has a Snapdragon 855 and 6GB RAM, both of which are better than what’s in the Galaxy Book 2 that I’m typing this on (SD850 and 4GB RAM). The only thing potentially worse is the storage speed.
On Windows Central I read that my Galaxy Book 2 uses Samsung eUFS (722 MB/s read and 200 MB/s write), supposedly faster than eMMC.
Apparently the Duo 1 uses UFS 3.0, which allows for (?) 2100 MBps read and 410MBps write, but that’s likely a protocol upper limit. Not sure. I see one page that claims 1071 MBps sequential read, and 217 MBps sequential write, so again, competitive. Nice!
Anyway seems like the specs rival the Book2, and on that device the performance of Win11 is passable. I’m getting more tempted by the minute.
Partitioning done. I’ve installed a zillion linuxes using gparted, which is the graphical interface to parted, so I’m semi-familiar with what was happening, it’s just a bit more nerve wracking when you have to manually type in blocks vs sliding a nice graphical slider back and forth before the program commits the changes to disk for you.
At each step, I was presenting with a warning that the resulting partition is not properly aligned for best performance. Type “i” to ignore the warning and proceed. Nothing blew up. Yet.
I had to stop here and fetch food for a few kids, because I did not start early enough.
I also went through the mass storage script and now my computer things a Xiaomi Mi 9 is connected, which is supposed to happen.
I’ve stalled after setting up Mass Storage Mode. Diskpart doesn’t see the partitions and I don’t know enough about the situation yet to troubleshoot. I’ll be back…
Nevermind, it’s Disk 1. I didn’t recognize it because of course it’s listing the entire SD1 at 104GB. But all the partitions are there. I didn’t blow it up yet!
Done. The hardest bit here was figuring out the path to install.wim. Dism has to run in an Administrator command prompt, which apparently doesn’t have access to my user folder. I ended up using the path to install.wim in the ISO that was still mounted as a DVD Drive at D:.
Reboot to Android and I have to set it up again, but it’s working. I have not attempted to boot windows yet, that section is to come. I’m going to set up Android first.
There is another section labeled Temporary and Optional to get sensors going. I’m going to do the Boot Windows section first and just see what I have. I’m going to use manual boot from PC for now. I do not anticipate needing to switch when I’m away from home so I think I’ll just leave it like this for now.
Really appreciate you documenting all of this. Currently mulling over whether I can convince my wife the SDuo would make a good valentines gift for me despite not having any valid use case for it…
ETA the second screen did some crazy stuff along the way, but now it’s “Getting ready”
ETA again - it did some scary totally black screen time and I forced it to reboot holding the power button. Android still booted fine, so I manually booted windows again. Again, some scary totally black screen time, but it finally went through to the OOBE. I’m setting up windows 11 now.
