For a while I’ve had an extra partition on my Samsung Evo 840 pro SSD with a Windows 10 installation on it. I’m not using it very often but when I need some windows-only software it comes in handy. I’ve used it for updating my TomTom rider and making backups of my iPhone with iTunes. Last year I’ve used it for playing iRacing because the Linux version was broken.

This year I’ve been playing with ethereum and mining, and that took up a big piece of disk space on the SSD. Because my Ubuntu 16.04 installation was running out of disk space I decided to add a secondary ssd dedicated to the Windows 10 installation.

This was the plan: copy the Windows partition to the new disk, run update-grub and be on my merry way. Well, that didn’t go as planned.

Moving the partition with Gparted was easy as pie. But when I booted into the Windows installation I got error 225 (0xc0000225). I believed it to be a wrong Windows boot config so I tried fixing it with bcedit but I botched it. I don’t exactly know what went wrong (it was already very late) so I decided to reinstall Windows.

Easy enough, download Windows 10 from the Microsoft site and create a usb startup disk. I bought a new 16GB usb disk the day before so that shouldn’t be a problem. Again, I was wrong.

I couldn’t get the usb stick to boot after dd-ing the Windows iso to the stick. After numerous attempts and getting it to work I believe it to be a lingering UEFI partition on the usb stick. After removing that and writing the iso to the usb stick with winusb I could boot of the stick.

Compiling WinUSB for Ubuntu 16.04:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

mkdir -p ~/src/
cd ~/src
git clone https://github.com/slacka/WinUSB.git
cd WinUSB
sudo apt-get install libwxbase3.0-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev
./configure
make

1
2

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M count=100
~/src/WinUSB/src/winusb --format ~/Downloads/Win10_1607_EnglishInternational_x64.iso /dev/sdc

So I booted the Windows Installer, selected the second ssd and…. an error. At that point I wasn’t really suprised because nothing seemed to work the first time.

We couldn’t create a new partition or locate an existing one. For more information, see the Setup log files.

After some Google'ing around and trying different formatted partitions the problem seems to be that the Windows installer expects Windows to be on the primary disk. Great! I worked around this issue by disabling port 0 on the SATA controller and running the Windows installer. After the installation I enabled it again, booted into my Linux installation and ran update-grub to add the new Windows installation to GRUB.

I managed to watch the whole first season of Stranger Things during this ordeal so you know how long this must have taken…