I was talking to my dad yesterday and he talked about how he dual booted windows and Linux in his college days. I immediately left to download Ubuntu, I feel so dumb for forgetting it’s an option. I literally only use windows so I can play Fortnite with friends. PSA: you can have both Linux and Windows, or you can use a vm in Linux. Be (mostly) free from Microsoft’s clammy hands.
I always found having each OS have a separate physical drive is much better, but partitioning is fine if you must.
It’s a luxury indeed. Hopefully maybe a little less now that decent storage has come down in price a lot
Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS,and linux chainloading to windows. Then I have aseparate NTFS drive as secondary drive in Windows and Linux, in case I need to work on data in either OS
Partitioning is great with a boot partition for each OS
Until Windows eats your Linux boot partition. I’ve learned my lesson, I only dual boot with separate drives now
Windows wont if you set two independent boot partitions, and you chainload from kinux grub to windows. windows never realizes there is another boot partition. Grub is your BIOS EFI default and Grub has an entry to kickoff windows boot. You can even boot to linux right after what ahould be a windows update restart, do your linux work and when you kickoff windows again the reatart and update continues. i have had this setup since 2017.
And when’s the last time that happened to you? I have Windows and Linux on my UEFI laptop on the same disk since 2020 and never had that happen on Windows 10 and 11.
I installed a second SSD into my new laptop and installed Debian on it. I set the new drive as the primary boot drive so windows doesn’t get a say and only loads when I select it from the boot menu. This way windows can’t trash the boot loader when it updates.
As others have said, I also highly recommend physically separate drives. I have found both Linux and Windows affect each other sometimes especially when you’re getting your bearings with dual booting.
For instance, after running Linux the clock in Windows will be wrong. And Windows will eat the Linux boot partition especially after feature packs (formerly called service packs), which come out about 1-2/year.
Just in case anyone stumbles in to this, there is a fix for the time issue:
The better way is to fix Windows to use a sensible system time. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_time#UTC_in_Microsoft_Windows
Anecdotally I’ve been dual booting Windows 11/Linux on my laptop for a couple years and I’ve never had issues with Windows affecting the boot partition and I feel like this is much less common with EFI. You can even have a separate EFI partition for Linux and choose boot order from the BIOS.
I’ve always done partition based dual booting since I first started using Linux and the last time I remember having an issue with Windows fucking with boot setup was like early/mid 2010s and it’s only happened a couple times in like 10 years of on and off dual booting.
Just install linux 2nd and have it probe foreign OS, and create a linux only boot partition. Grub will then make a chainloader entry to windows boot partition. Linux won’t care if you select windows chainload option, and Windows won’t know it ia being chainloaded. No OS overlap. just set Grub Boot entry as primary boot in BIOS, EFI.
wait, you can have two different systems, on two SSDs, on the same computer? this will be useful once i get to build my pc. Thanks!
i’m guessing having windows on a separate drive will mean that it won’t break GRUB?
I think they may actually be suggesting that you let each OS be the primary OS and then just control which one you want via boot order in the BIOS.
But yes, if Windows is able to install its boot loader on its own drive, it will not mess up the Linux boot loader on another drive. The Linux boot loader can detect Windows though and allow you to boot to it ( and Linux too of course ). That is why you make sure Linux boots first.
I triple boot Windows with a Debian distro and an Arch distro. Windows is on one drive with its boot loader there so it doesn’t mess with the linux boot loaders and vice versa, and the two linux distros and their boot loaders are on a second drive. Just make sure Windows is already there and the linux boot loaders will pick it up.
Yeah, AFAIR, the issue of “windows messing up grub” could happen when it’s installed on the same disk (e.g. on a laptop with one disk). Something about it overwriting the “MBR sector”. At least that was a problem back before UEFI.
I too have been dual booting Windows 10 and Linux for many years now, each having their own physical disk, Linux one always being first in boot order. Not once did a Windows 10 update mess up grub for me with this setup.
imo dual booting is kinda clunky. Id rather have a vm of windows tbh. I dont like restarting my pc to swtich OS.
But hey if you like it, more power to you man.
Ah I gotcha. Another option im considering is using a separate pc for windows and using a kvm to switch between them. That may be a good option for you as well if you can swing it.
