I always found having each OS have a separate physical drive is much better, but partitioning is fine if you must.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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It's a luxury indeed. Hopefully maybe a little less now that decent storage has come down in price a lot
Have to agree on that. SSD and RAM prices have gone down significantly.
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.
A couple of years ago, don't know exactly, but maybe 2018? Somewhere around there at least
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.
So much this, having each OS in a separate drive saves so many headaches
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.
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.
Only did it bc anti cheats. I would use vms otherwise.
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.
Unfortunately no, I'm trying to save money atm.
Are there any performance losses running Windows VM to play games? Asking as I am new to this.
We used to dual boot before virtualization matured.
Be aware that Windows will snitch on you if you run it in a VM. I don't know about Forkknife in particular, but if a game's TOS prohibits it, or the anti-cheat is having a bad day, it might get you banned. There are ways to trick Windows into thinking it's running on metal, but it's always a risk.
That's why I went with dual booting over a vm. Battleye and ez anti cheat both try to detect even Microsoft's hyper-v.
thats the reason i dont play those Games anymore(although i would love to). i cannot live with the fact, that i am not in charge on my own device
I only boot windows for Fortnite and The Crew 2 because of BS DRM. Everything else runs great.
Use Grub2Win (https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub2win/) whenever Windows manages to break dual booting. It'll stop fucking up afterwards, as it'll be installed within one of the windows boot partitions.
Personally I'm not a fan of dual booting. Admittedly it's been many years since I have evn tried (now that virtualization is what it is), but when I did, grub would always break on me. It just wasn't worth the hassle. Now to think of having to reboot to switch just makes me cringe. Lol