Dual Boot Linux (Ubuntu 22.04) and Windows 11 on Modern Systems – UEFI

Thursday, December 7th, 2023

Dual Boot Linux (Ubuntu 22.04) and Windows 11 on Modern Systems – UEFI

In order to setup a dual boot of Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 on a modern system that uses UEFI, follow these steps.

  1. Install Windows 11 first leaving some unpartitioned space (at least 60GB is my recommendation) on the drive you're installing Windows on.
  2. Boot up the Ubuntu installer.
  3. During installation, you'll be presented with an Installation Type options screen.  Choose "Something else". 
  4. On the next screen, you'll see a list of drives and partitions.  On the same drive you installed Windows, create 3 new partitions. 
    1. Create an EXT4 partition for the / mount point at least 40GB in size (this is the main drive for Linux files).
    2. Create a SWAP partition at least 18GB in size.
    3. Create an EFI partition at least 500MB in size.  This is extremely important in order to get grub to install properly. 
  5. Leave the "Device for boot loader installation" set as the top level drive that Windows and Ubuntu was / is being installed on.  You should not select an individual partition here.
  6. Complete the installation process. 
  7. You might need to change the UEFI boot order in the BIOS of your system to boot Ubuntu / Linux first versus booting the Windows EFI partition.  Since you created an EFI partition for your Linux install, it should show up as a bootable option in the bios.  Set / adjust accordingly.
  8. That's it!

Areca Backup – Getting it to Work in Windows 10 / 11 64-bit

Saturday, March 4th, 2023

Getting Areca Backup to Work on Modern Systems

Unfortunately, Areca Backup hasn't been updated since 2015.  But, it still works great, and it's an awesome program that can compress and encrypt files into a backup archive that can be transferred to a NAS drive or uploaded to the cloud.  However, getting it to work on a modern system can be a chore.  After installing Areca Backup, when you try to launch the application, if nothing happens, you will need to perform both of the following fixes:

Install 32-bit Java first [Windows Offline], and then install 64-bit Java second [Windows Offline (64-bit)] if you have a 64-bit operating system.  Without the 64-bit version of Java, Areca will not launch on a 64-bit system.

The next step to getting Areca to run is to replace the "swt.jar" file in the lib folder found in the installation directory (default is C:\Program Files (x86)\Areca\) with this one:  http://dinofly.com/files/swt.zip

Once the original swt.jar file has been replaced in C:\Program Files (x86)\Areca\lib with the one linked above, Areca will now open and run properly.

Tested on Windows 7 x64, Windows 10 x64, and Windows 11 x64.