Windows & Linux: Dual Drive Dual Boot 

An extremely good point (if you want to access the Windows drive from Linux). I always have Fast Boot disabled in Windows regardless, and forget that others may leave it on!

I recently disabled the fast boot thing as windows itself was having problems recognizing the dock. Have been trouble free since.

I was going to comment this exact thing. Disable the settings in Windows with msconfig and then go to the boot tab. I do tend to also run shutdown /s /f /t0 at the Windows command prompt before switching/installing.

I disable fast boot and give about 5 seconds to choose where to boot from. I like that installing Arco/Mint last usually gives me GRUB.

Will it make the booting time slower? Also Is it also recommended if you aren't dual booting ? As I have heard that since the windows never properly shuts down your pc'c performance may degrade overtime but A simple restart once in a while will do equally good job.

I personally had a Windows Linux dual boot laptop crash when a Windows update could not complete due to the GRUB boot loader not being compatible with the Windows automatic upgrade to Windows 10. I have to recommend a virtuall machine. You can have a Windows VM inside Linux or a Linux VM inside Windows. Or just use separate hardware.

@@wcdeich4 if GRUB crashes, I could run Boot repair from the live USB and voila! I had a thing like that, I was stuck at GRUB with no options and just a command line, so I used boot repair.

​@@wcdeich4The first method shown by Chris (remove the Windows drive while installing Linux) is extremely safe and can't be held responsible for any failed Windows updates because the only bootloader on the Windows drive is the Microsoft one. That said, I have more than enough accumulated computer hardware that I don't need to dual boot anymore.

​@@wcdeich4the problem with a VM is that the virtual OS has to interface with a very limited set of virtual hardware - generic Intel chips. Does that ever limit the abilities of the virtual OS to do stuff it could easily manage if that OS was running on bare metal?

Run Windows inside Linux with a virtual machine. Much safer, no MS spyware in your kernel.

why

I would say it would have been true before UEFI and Secure Boot showed up. Now Microsoft could easily block it by enforcing the latter.

@@cldream True, and that's why no one should use Windows. I would say lock the BIOS or boot loader or something, but Microsoft has the keys and can bypass it all anyway. In fact, it'd be better to not even use a modern computer and instead build your own from scratch components, but no one has the resources to actually do that. So your options are either install a lot of OSS and hope for the best or become a luddite. I'm sure most would call this paranoia, but is it really paranoid if they actually are out to get you?

@@anon_y_mousse Secure Boot is just that - They can use the UEFI, lock it down to JUST use Microsoft keys. So most of the Linux distros would be out (unless if you want to use a bootloader signed with Microsoft keys.)

@@cldream That's what I'm saying. Even if you lock it yourself to prevent tampering, Microsoft can still modify settings and do whatever they want.

See my comment! 🙂

Thank you

With the current price of storage, I always just get another drive for systems I want to run. You can get an SSD to tinker with for like $20 now that's reasonable for a Linux test drive. Even M.2 prices are getting really good.

Yeah, if you've got the capacity, then dual boot dual drive is the superior option. Because, basically, both operating systems live on their own hard drives and "never the twain shall meet". They don't get in each other's way at all. And "the hardware method" - where you literally completely remove the Windows drive to install Linux - does make setting up dual boot so much safer. If Windows is not even connected to the system in any way, then it's just not physically possible to accidentally overwrite it or anything. I don't mind the GRUB menu myself. But it's better to use "the hardware method" and ensure it's only installed on the Linux drive, because then it's kept out of the way of Windows. Which does have a habit of overwriting GRUB and corrupting it. (This is Microsoft being anti-competitive arseholes. Because operating systems are totally labelled on the disk and Windows could simply read this, recognise that it's Linux - as Linux uses a standard well-known signature - and then leave it alone. We totally know that Microsoft could do this, because Windows does perform a scan of your hard drives when installing to recognise if you've got multiple Windows versions installed, and then leaves those other versions of Windows alone. It absolutely could 100% do this with Linux as well. But Microsoft don't want other operating systems being "room mates" with Windows, so it deliberately acts like an arsehole and corrupts GRUB. They're hoping that you'll blame GRUB for corrupt, not Windows for being the actual guilty party that broke it. Sneaky sods, eh? But this is demonstrably nonsense, as GRUB works just fine when Windows isn't there and doesn't corrupt. And if you use "the hardware method" so that GRUB is nowhere near Windows, it also operates just fine with zero corruption issues. To be clear, Windows is the cause - it literally just overwrites the boot sector with its own boot loader blindly, without checking if there's anything already there. But they're hoping - and from the way people talk about GRUB that I've seen, they very often get away with this shady behaviour - that you'll assume GRUB is the guilty party. But, for the record, it isn't. Which, as I say, is demonstrably proven by removing the Windows drive, so GRUB is 100% on the other non-Windows drive, and you'll find that neither interferes with the other and it's 100% fine and dandy, with no corruption issues at all.) So remove Windows. Install Linux (and GRUB) on a second hard drive. Re-connect Windows. Then you have the option to, as in this video, boot to Windows and use the boot menu to switch to Linux. But as I primarily use Linux and only rarely bother with Windows, I boot to the Linux drive and have the GRUB menu, where Linux is the default option and Windows is there as a secondary option. (Note that this is the one thing that needs to be sorted with "the hardware method". Because Linux and GRUB are installed without Windows being connected, GRUB won't have Windows in its menu. But you can, with both drives installed, have GRUB re-scan your computer, picking up both operating systems and updating the menu to include both. Indeed, though there's nothing wrong with the BIOS boot menu, I use GRUB because it's configurable. I've got a nice background image and have changed the font and font size, and so forth, with mine. There's a nice utility "GRUB Customizer" in the repositories that is a GUI app that lets you customise it all and you can re-scan the menu - or even manually edit it however you wish - there. Default GRUB is a bit bland, but you can make it all nice and fancy, if you want.)

Used Debian earlier this year, it's super stable, what I love about it. Plenty of DEs to choose from.

Thanks for your support -- sorry I missed this earlier. Crazy week!

What you are suggesting doesn't work with Linux Mint. I have tried several times, it failed every single time. I selected the SATA drive as device for boot loader installation, I selected the Windows EFI partition and changed it from "use as EFI partition" to "do not use partition", created a new EFI partition on the SATA drive and selected that, set its mount point to /boot/efi, and the LM installer ignored all of that.

Can you please elaborate, whenever I'm trying method B... That is, installing Ubuntu on an external SSD (without removing internal SSD of laptop having Win10), the GRUB gets installed on windows partition and when I remove the external SSD, windows cannot boot displaying a grub bootloader with minimal bash screen

I did not know that you could install the home and setting directories in separate locations from the OS. That is incredibly useful. Thank you for the information! I'll need to take some time to learn about messing around with my fstab.

Thanks for the detailed explanation. Is it possible to install /home directory on a removable USB stick?

@@lewisse_8966 Linux had this kind of flexibility since 30years.

@@ricsip That's fantastic! Still learning what Linux has to offer coming from Windows and I'm sure there's more it has to offer.

Yes, I was thinking of doing the same myself, except just with separate partitions. I think this is more the key point here than necessarily having to be separate drives?

Glad to hear that things worked. :)

Greetings James. :)

For future reference, if at some point you have issues with grub again, a tool called boot repair can be used on a live usb to quickly and easily fix a corrupt grub bootloader. Grub customizer can be used to change boot order etc. Both have a gui and are very easy to use. Got me out of a jam several times where I otherwise would have had to reformat or learn how to fix grub the hard way via the command line.

@@ExplainingComputersplease admin. I’ve issue with my browser on Kali Linux. Kindly help me out by instruct me on how to fix it.

You got me🤣

That's a good plan!

​@@kg4wrqWorked perfectly, but then, I had a great teacher!

what are the difference in the SSD for the CPU, and SSD for the chipset. is there a performance change ?

Tom's Root'n'Boot. And others.

@@loginregional I've just checked out the alternatives, some I'd never heard of but thanks for this :)

Tx for the tip. BTW, on dual (or even more) boot, on the Linux I can set the sequence of OS initialization and other parameters using a program/app called GRUB CUSTOMIZER which is easy-to-use and also has a graphical interface. No Terminal commands NECESSARY if you want.

@@alanthornton3530 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt

Very true.

why?

can virtualbox use an existing windows install as a VM? I'd love to access it from Linux and vice versa, so I could also boot into Windows and VM into Linux...

@@leevfx I highly doubt it which is why I haven't tried it. Windows has a history of being very pick about its storage controllers. I have heard that Windows 10 has improved on that so something like moving your NVME to a new motherboard may work but not always and still has issues. I wouldn't recommend it. I know it works with Arch Linux for a fact without on issues. I have even installed the "guest utilities" and have not had a problem with doing this on Linux.

@@leevfx The latter does work. I boot up into Windows, start up virtual box and boot into my Linux setup from within windows without a problem to be more clear.

VirtualBox can boot a physical drive as if it was a virtual disk ISO? Aren't there differences in the hardware reported to the OS? Every time I used to use VirtualBox or other VM solutions, the VM OS would only see a limited set of basic generic Intel chips, even if the bare metal hardware was something else. So Linux would think it was connected to a system with one set of hardware one minute and then another system the next minute. This would minimally make Linux go through some otherwise-unnecessary Discover New Hardware checks after every such cross-system reboot.

@@chrisschembari2486 Yes it can. You have run a few commands from the command prompt in windows to crate the file but can easily be found online. When you boot up from within virtual box it reports a different GPU and different hardware than from when you boot up directly from bios of course. Mine detects the GPU as VMware display driver instead of my Radeon RX 6600. When I boot up into Linux from the bios menu Neofetch reports the RX 6600 and the rest of the hardware properly. It all works just fine within Virtual box and booting regularly though no issues at all.

That's good to know. Thanks for the tip.

Or turn off fast startup

or simply always use legacy bios mode disabling all the UEFI crap

Thanks for watching. :)

Missing NTLDR was luckily easy to fix, just boot the Windows CD and either jump into cmd either with the Recovery Console and do "fixboot" or since Vista even a GUI helps with that. If it was the only thing missing and not because you formatted the wrong partition and installed something on that, that is.

@@gentuxable easy to fix but always gives a bit of a flutter!

Especially for windows. Not as great a risk for Linux. But between a good VPN and a decent anti virus, my fears are allayed .

This isn't just a problem for dual-booting, but virtual machines as well. However, in this case, we're not just talking about two operating systems but sometimes dozens. Ultimately, for most people, housekeeping one OS is bad enough and will just deal with any shortcomings their chosen single OS may have.

@@StoryGamingCutscenes I've been running Windows 7 since 2009 with no problems in recent years, except for companies dropping support for it.

@@lesliedeana5142 Linux can be exploited just as Windows can. Please do not believe the old wive's tale that one OS is any more secure than any other.

@@FlyboyHelosim The good thing about a VM being shut down for months is, at least in general a VM is not going to have bare metal etc.

Good point -- I forgot to mention this. But here secure boot is turned on. Linux Mint works with secure boot, but this may not be the case for all distros.

@@ExplainingComputers Ubuntu works with secure boot as well! I'm doing this now

Usb ventoy🤓 Ich habe ubuntu ssd1 ❤ und ssd2 windows installieren 🫡🫡🫡

Windows has not used NTFS since Windows XP It's all GPT now

@@Robbie-mw5uu GPT is the partition table to address modern larger disk sizes and is not unique to Windows. NTFS is the 'file system' as in 'NT file system' or "New Technology File System" the partition is formatted in under Windows. It's MS proprietary and is still used. A drive is not formatted with 'GPT'. Linux can and does eventually screw up partitions formatted with NTFS.

The interesting thing is, nobody will post here "why insult Windows . . . "

bcoz Linus don't deserve respect 😅

I appreciate that!

Good luck!

Thanks for this -- all of my Linux guides and reviews are listed here: www.explainingcomputers.com/linux_videos.html