Do you want a guide to dual (or more) boot without the need for fiddling with bootloaders?

BigBadBeef

BigBadBeef

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Some of you would want dual boot but are afraid, that someday, a windows update might come that will wreck your grub or systemd-boot. It happened before and it might happen again.

For that reason (using layman terms with metaphors here) you want to stick your windows installation into some deep, dank corner of your computer, where it won't even know that a Linux distro also exists on your computer. Like keeping a rabid dog locked up behind a fence so that it doesn't bite your sister, but still keeping it around for that rare occasion that you might actually need it.

Well, I can help you with that. Long backstory short, my old HDD died and I finally purchased myself a 3.5" to 2.5" hot swap adapter and a 1TB SSD and am once again ready to install a copy of windows unto my pc. I am going to do it with the method described above, for the reason described above.

If enough of you are interested, I will document my work with pictures and all, and make guide for you here.

What say you - you want this?
 


I can't speak for others here. My days of using Windows are at least a decade behind me; certainly I multiboot, but ONLY Linux these days - but I appreciate that many either just WANT to keep a copy of Windows around - 'cos you never know! - or else have a genuine need to run it, because of time and/or cash invested in proprietary software.

My answer to this was always to keep the two totally separate.....on different hard drives....and preferably on separate machines. I appreciate this isn't always practical for a lot of folks, so any kind of guide to running the two without problems is always going to be useful!


Mike. ;)
 
I still have a dual boot. But I do it differently from most.
I have two disks, I keep everything separate. I manage the current boot disk in the BIOS ( well actually UEFI )
 
If you're up for it and able to do so convincingly, you can always share it as an article on my site. It'll get wider exposure AND give me a day off! I will never write content like that because I don't use Windows and I don't dual boot anything. So, it'd be content that would otherwise not exist.
 
dos2unix said:
I still have a dual boot. But I do it differently from most.
I have two disks, I keep everything separate. I manage the current boot disk in the BIOS ( well actually UEFI )
Click to expand...
Which is what I intend to do.
KGIII said:
If you're up for it and able to do so convincingly, you can always share it as an article on my site. It'll get wider exposure AND give me a day off! I will never write content like that because I don't use Windows and I don't dual boot anything. So, it'd be content that would otherwise not exist.
Click to expand...
I'd prefer not to use windows as well, but I still need it for the few things that just won't work on Linux. However, in order to do that, taking screenshots is out of the question. I would need to be taking pictures of my screen with my phone. Fortunately its a high quality monitor with advanced anti-glare coating.

Annyways, the jury is still out until next saturday, I will see if people actually want something like that.
 
I actually recently installed Windows on my physical desktop system because I wanted to see how it hard it would be to get a dual-boot with Windows and Linux, since I hear so many people complain about how hard it is and I wanted do a quick comparison of how my Steam games ran compared to Linux. So my Linux install was actually already there with systemd-boot, so I bought a second nvme ssd and installed Windows.

What happened was Windows wrote the efi files to the already existing efi partition, under /efi/EFI/Microsoft It didn't see Windows then yet, so I booted into Windows. Then I checked to see what I the output of "efibootdump" looked liked. I did saw a "Windows bootloader" listed there as well. I deleted the "Windows bootloader" entree and then I ran either "bootctl install" or "bootctl update" I rebooted and I a Windows 11 boot entry was automatically added to my boot list. I then decided to remove Windows to see how much effort that would take, all I had to do was delete "/efi/EFI/Microsoft", reboot and Windows as gone from my boot entree list.
Code: 
[root@lilith ~]# ls /efi/EFI
BOOT  Linux  systemd

Took less effort than what many people seem to experience from reading different forum topics and Reddit posts.
 
Last edited:
Its gonna be an extra week. The damned hot swap adapter still hasn't arrived yet. :mad:
 
must be coming from Amazon....
 
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