Dual-Boot

[Lord_Zeuz]

So I got 3 drives on my computer

Drive 1 - NVMe 500GB ( Boot + OS )

Drive 2- HDD 3TB ( all files ex: games, vids, pics, etc ... )

Drive 3- HDD 2TB ( This drive still unallocated )

My Windows 10 is installed on Drive 1, all my games and files are on Drive 2 and I recently bought Drive 3 which I plan installing Ubuntu on.

But I came to wonder if that would cause any troubles when Dual Booting or when removing Ubuntu.

So I came here to get some advices and tips to make it easier to install, uninstall and things to do and not to do.

All help will be very appreciated, thank you.

[Cryosec]

Install ubuntu while keeping the other drives disconnected, so GRUB won't bother overwriting windows boot stuff (can't remember the name). this kinda forces you to manually select boot device at boot if you want to use Ubuntu;

you should also keep your windows drive as first boot option. 

[TheGlenlivet]

I have ubuntu on the same drive that my windows games are on, just on it's own partition with my windows install on a second drive.  I select that as the boot drive when I want to get into it, otherwise it boots to windows by default.  There are a few different ways you could do this but Cryosec's eliminates the possibility of accidentally overwriting anything on a current drive.

[Moresh]

On 27. 7. 2017 at 8:43 PM, Cryosec said:

Install ubuntu while keeping the other drives disconnected, so GRUB won't bother overwriting windows boot stuff (can't remember the name). this kinda forces you to manually select boot device at boot if you want to use Ubuntu;

you should also keep your windows drive as first boot option. 

I'm was thinking of doing a dual boot as well on my new PC. NVMe for Win10 and SATA SSD for Linux. Is there a way of "hiding" the respective drives from each other while in one of the two Os's. So when I am in Win10 it doesn't see the Sata SSD and ergo the Linux OS and vice versa. Is that something I can set in the BIOS and also in the BIOS setting a promt to choose which drive to boot of?

[Cryosec]

1 hour ago, Moresh said:

I'm was thinking of doing a dual boot as well on my new PC. NVMe for Win10 and SATA SSD for Linux. Is there a way of "hiding" the respective drives from each other while in one of the two Os's. So when I am in Win10 it doesn't see the Sata SSD and ergo the Linux OS and vice versa. Is that something I can set in the BIOS and also in the BIOS setting a promt to choose which drive to boot of?

You could hide the Linux OS by installing it in an ext4 partition, IIRC windows won't recognize it. But the other way around might need someone who know more than I do. You can just not mount the drive while using linux.

 

If you want a visual prompt for choosing a boot drive, you should install linux while keeping connected the windows drive, so the installation will add Windows Boot Manager to GRUB (aka the screen where you choose what to boot in linux). BIOS-side, you can only choose the default boot drive if you don't manually choose another one