Dual-Boot (rEFInd) with Bazzite OS (Steam) and Batocera WITHOUT Windows

 I recently bought a mini PC Beelink SER6 (x64) to play retro games and Steam games. My aim was to have a dedicated machine that would stand in the living room like a console and not have any Windows menus or anything similar. It should load directly into the relevant operating systems, including a “game” interface.

I chose Batocera for retro games and Bazzite OS for Steam, because it offers a gaming mode that loads Steam in full screen instead of a desktop (console feeling ;-) )

However, in order to run both operating systems in parallel, a few manual steps are required, which I would like to list below :-)


Preparation:

  1. Make sure you have secure boot disabled in your bios and that it boots from USB-Stick, first.
  2. Would be great to have 3 USB-Sticks. If you only have 1 or 2 you have to make one step after the other..but that should be no problem..just a little bit more plugging/unplugging ;-)
  3. Download Batocera from https://batocera.org/download and choose your platform. In my case its Desktop PC.
  4. Download Bazzite OS with GameMode from https://bazzite.gg/#image-picker (in my case as follows)
  5.  Download Ubuntu from https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
  6.  Download a flashing tool of your choice to create bootable usb-sticks like Etcher from https://etcher.balena.io/#download-etcher
  7. Create a bootable stick with etcher and the ubuntu-image (min 8GB USB-Stick)
  8. Create a bootable stick with etcher and the bazzite-image (min 16GB USB-Stick)
  9. Extract the batocera-image (f.e. with 7zip).
    1. It contains a 0.vfat.fat file: extract that with 7zip (or any other), too 
    2. Copy the complete content to another USB-Stick (it should contain the folders boot, EFI,tools,..)
      It should look like this:

 

Installation process:

  1. Boot with the ubuntu-stick, open geparted and delete all partitions from the drive you want to have the dualboot on. (I did this step to have a clean installation. If you dont want to delete all partitions I dont know if my tutorial will work :-D )

  2. Shutdown and boot with the bazzite-usb-stick and follow the instructions. Please let bazzite automatically create the partitions for you



  3.  After the installation is finished, shutdown, remove the usb-stick and boot from the bazzite-installation partition (should be default so no need to do anything).

  4. Let the bazzite installation complete its installation (it will automatically install some updates..can take up to 20min)

  5. Shutdown and boot with the ubuntu-usb-stick again.

  6. Open a terminal and run the following commands to be sure it can handle fat32 partitions correctly.

    sudo apt install dosfstools

    and then

    sudo apt install mtools

  7. Open gparted from the menu
    1. select the newly created "big" partition from bazzite (should be named something like bazzite-deck_fedora). This partition ate up all the remaining space so we have to take some away from it.

    2. right-click on the partition and select to resize it.
      I took about 10GB because I only need 8GB for the batocera-boot and some placebo-userdata-partition for batocera that it can work properly. I will have another drive for the userdata so 10gb should be good.

    3. create these partitions:

      1. Partition 

      16 GB FAT32 (with flags legacy_boot,msftdata) (the screenshot below has an 8GB but 16GB is future proof ;-))

      Name: vfat

      Label: BATOCERA

      2. Partition 

      64GB ext4 (doesnt matter we will have a separate drive for userdata anyways) 

      Name: userdata

      Label: SHARE

    5. Finish with the green button on top.

  8.  Copy the extracted (from the first steps above) batocera-files to the 16GB Fat32 partition
    1. Execute this command (adjust the path-names)

      sudo cp -r /media/myusbdrivexy/my_folder_with_files_to_copy/* /media/myFat32Partition

      (in my case I opened both drive through "files"-UI, right click and selected open in terminal to get the correct paths)


  9.  Install boot-manager rEFInd with the following command (when it asks to create some stuff automatically, select YES)

    sudo apt install refind

  10. Reboot and open directly your bios (note that this can look completly different to yours depending on which brand of pc you have).

  11. change the boot priority to rEFInd (should appear now)



Now you can save all changes and reboot.

You should see the rEFInd-Bootmenu. Please follow other tutorials on the internet how to make it look nice ;-)


 







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