PC install problems

[Russ B]

I tried installing the latest version of Android-x86 (v6.0-r1) on my Sony Vaio Duo (convertible tablet/laptop), but I have problems getting it to boot.

- If I install it to the hard drive, the OS is not detected during the boot process, and I am unable to boot it.  This seams to be a common problem with alternate OSs on UEFI systems.  They will only boot to the OS that was installed when the system was built.  (NOTE: I did turn off secure boot in the BIOS.)

-If I install it to a USB drive, I can get it to boot, BUT... The "live" install that is setup on the USB drive does NOT maintain it's Android "data" partition, so every time I reboot the PC, it looses the Android configuration and all of the Android apps I have downloaded/installed.  Why is there no persistent storage with USB installs??? 

NOTE:  I have tried installing various versions of Android and Linux on quite a few UEFI systems.  On a few systems, I was able to get around the UEFI related hard drive boot issues with several OSs by installing the "rEFInd" UEFI boot menu software.  I find that this software works MUCH better than GRUB on UEFI systems.  However, the "rEFInd" UEFI menu sotware does not detect the EFI entry for PhoenixOS after a hard drive install.

Vaio Duo (convertible tablet/laptop), but I have problems getting it to boot.

- If I install it to the hard drive, the OS is not detected during the boot process, and I am unable to boot it.  This seams to be a common problem with alternate OSs on UEFI systems.  They will only boot to the OS that was installed when the system was built.  (NOTE: I did turn off secure boot in the BIOS.)

-If I install it to a USB drive, I can get it to boot... however, the "live" install that is setup on the USB drive does NOT maintain it's Android "data" partition, so every time I reboot the PC, it looses the Android configuration and all of the Android apps I have downloaded/installed.  Why is there no persistent storage with USB installs??? 

NOTE:  I have tried installing various versions of Android and Linux on quite a few UEFI systems.  On a few systems, I was able to get around the UEFI related hard drive boot issues with several OSs by installing the "rEFInd" UEFI boot menu software.  I find that this software works MUCH better than GRUB on UEFI systems.  However, the "rEFInd" UEFI menu sotware does not detect the EFI entry for PhoenixOS after a hard drive install.

[Evan Langlois]

Many systems have a bug when it comes to EFI boot where the path to the EFI file is hard coded into the BIOS (such as my HP).  There are two solutions.  On my HP, you can select ESC to get a menu of options when it first starts to boot.  In this menu, F9 is the "Boot Menu".  You can also press F9 instead of ESC to bypass the main menu and go directly to the boot menu.  Your Vaio should have a similar feature.   This menu will contain any alternate OSs that have been installed and may also have the option to boot an EFI file that you find for it.  The default boot will always be the hardcoded path to Windows because the BIOS ignores the option change the boot order.

The second alternative is to copy the windows EFI file (C:\windows\boot\bootmgfw.efi)  to some place else and point your grub.cfg entry to the new location.   Now copy the grub bootx64.efi (or rEFInd) file over the original windows version as C:\windows\boot\bootmgfw.efi   I have done this with my laptop and it works great.

rEFInd will not see the RemixOS kernel automatically because remix does not name the kernel and initrd in a compatible manner.  You can edit the rEFInd config file to create entried for Remix, and you can even select custom icons and backgrounds.  Read the documentation that comes with rEFInd.

[No Tae Hoon]

Make another FAT32 Partition on your HDD for Android-x86.
Some case of that, bootloader can't recognize ntfs partition.