I'm a n00b and want to dual-boot Win 10 & Ubuntu

[Abudis]

Hello forum.

I recently bought a 500GB SSD (Samsung 850 Evo) which was on sale and haven't installed it yet. I am on a system with a 120GB SSD (an Intel from the early days) and a 1TB hard-drive (WD Black). So I was planning to make a clean install of Windows 10 (but still do it on the 120gb SSD), use the HDD for storage and use the new 500gb SSD for my games and some programs. All this seems pretty easy to do.

However, since I'll be going through this whole process, I figured I might as well install Linux on the side (I chose Ubuntu, because I feel it's a good mix of ease of use for novices but functionality as well). I've tried that once before, but didn't really manage to have it work properly and just gave up on it. A mix of MBR, UEFI, Windows Boot Manager, grub (these are mostly just words to me) problems.

What I want to achieve is the following: switch on the PC and have automatically boot into Windows unless I do something. And then have a reasonable amount of free space for my Ubuntu installation but also have a chunk of my HDD available (let's say 150-200 gb) if I want to start playing around with it more. How should I go about doing all that?

(One solution i thought of while writing this, regarding booting straight into Windows unless instructed differently, is to install each OS on its own SSD and then just choose boot media through the Boot Menu.)

What I want basically is to split the two (or even all three of them, I think this should work the same) drives into 2 sets of partitions and when I switch on the PC it uses the first larger set and Windows 10, or else if I tell it to, to use the second smaller set and boot me into Ubuntu.
Thank you

[Windows7ge]

What I did for my laptop was install Windows 10. After the fact I went into disk management and shrunk the partition/volume which made room for me to dualboot with Ubuntu. After installing Ubuntu on the free space on the disk it gave me Grub (an piece of code from linux that shows you your boot options (partitions. Windows or Ubuntu in this instance). Clicking nothing would boot ubuntu. Selecting the windows partition will boot windows.

 

You should be able to used the windows boot loader (under System Configuration) to make it so Windows is the default boot partition. It will then give you the boot options of volume1, volume2, etc. (1 being windows, 2 being linux, 3 being whatever else you'd like to install.

 

You can create your various partitions when you go to install windows or linux. (whichever you install first) Alternatively you can do it from within the OS (new partitions, shrinking existing volumes, etc.)

[Underfire17]

What I have done is install Windows and Linux on two separate HDDs in my laptop. I mainly use it so that I can keep them separate and get the best storage out of the drives.

 

If you have a DVD drive still, you may look into swapping it out with a converter and an SSD. You will probably want to mess with the bios so it will boot off of your Windows disk first though.

 

Hope this helps!

[Sauron]

2 hours ago, Abudis said:

(One solution i thought of while writing this, regarding booting straight into Windows unless instructed differently, is to install each OS on its own SSD and then just choose boot media through the Boot Menu.)

This is actually the best solution; dual booting on the same drive can be clunky to set up and windows 10 has been known to break that sort of thing when it updates. Having a dedicated drive for each OS is simpler and safer.

[Shura]

On 4/3/2019 at 1:05 AM, Abudis said:

What I want to achieve is the following: switch on the PC and have automatically boot into Windows unless I do something. And then have a reasonable amount of free space for my Ubuntu installation but also have a chunk of my HDD available (let's say 150-200 gb) if I want to start playing around with it more. How should I go about doing all that?

(One solution i thought of while writing this, regarding booting straight into Windows unless instructed differently, is to install each OS on its own SSD and then just choose boot media through the Boot Menu.)

What I want basically is to split the two (or even all three of them, I think this should work the same) drives into 2 sets of partitiuons and when I switch on the PC it uses the first larger set and Windows 10, or else if I tell it to, to use the second smaller set and boot me into Ubuntu.
Thank you

You don't need to do anything with the original ssd, if you want to do a clean install of windows, go settings > backup > recovery and just do a clean reset. Once done, install the new 500GB ssd and split the partitions if you like, something like 30/70 and install ubuntu onto the partition. You can use the 70% left over as a storage partition or for future installs of different distros. You can choose which OS to boot by going into the boot menu of your computer. One thing to note is when installing ubuntu make sure the bootloader/grub is NOT installed on the windows drive. 

 

Another suggestion is, if you want windows as default, you can install windows on the 500gb ssd and linux on the 120gb. Linux doesn't need a lot of space, unlike windows. Windows uses NTFS filesystem by default and Linux uses EXT4, Linux can read NTFS pretty well whereas Windows can't read EXT4 without third party programs. The point is, if you make the 500GB windows, you can still access the drive and use that space if need be from linux. But if you make Linux the 500GB, you can't access that space and use it from windows without workarounds.

[Abudis]

From your replies I've gathered that installing both OSes on the same drive is a bit of a pain in the butt. Let alone having it my way and being able to split all three drives in a 70/30 or 80/20 way for Win10 and Ubuntu respectively.

[Shura]

10 hours ago, Abudis said:

From your replies I've gathered that installing both OSes on the same drive is a bit of a pain in the butt. Let alone having it my way and being able to split all three drives in a 70/30 or 80/20 way for Win10 and Ubuntu respectively.

I made a mistake in my original post, I meant to say "make sure the bootloader/grub is "NOT" installed on the windows drive"

 

Installing both OS not the same drive isn't that big of a deal, My laptop can only have one drive so I have it split for both linux and windows(need windows for some work software). The problem is, sometimes an update to grub in linux or even an update from microsoft on windows can effect the boot partition, which can make accessing either OS a problem. This isn't a common issue but it does happen, I had it happen when I installed Linux kernal 5.0; This was fixed by rebuilding initramfs and reinstalling grub but both had to be done from command line, which can be a pain for some. Since you plan to be using multiple drives, you might as well take advantage of that and install the OSs more efficiently.

 

Based on your setup, if it was me I would, Install Linux on the 120gb, split the 500gb if you don't plan to use windows much. If you do use windows a lot and have a lot of things that take up space like steam games, leave the 500gb as it is. Once you have linux setup, install a software called ntfs-3g, this will allow you to access and write to the 500gb normally from linux. This way if for some reason you use up the 120gb on the linux drive and need more space, you can access the 500gb.