linux windows dual booting

[StalePie42]

Hello i was interested in dual booting windows and popos on my new build on two separate drives but all the tutorials i find show different things i was wondering if there was an easy way to dual boot the two without having to do any complicated command line stuff 

thanks in advance

[BobVonBob]

Many Linux distros will detect a Windows installation during their own install process and easily set up dual booting for you, then you can switch between the two during startup.

[C2dan88]

52 minutes ago, StalePie42 said:

Hello i was interested in dual booting windows and popos

Dual booting is easy if you are installing on separate drives.

During install you select the drive you want popos to be installed to.

When booting which os to boot you have two options either boot into the bios and choose which drive to boot first or use grub

 

If you are afraid of nuking windows then disconnect your drive while installing popos. Reconnect the drive after install and run grub-update to add windows to grub boot menu

[Guest]

I installed Manjaro GNOME on a SATA drive and Windows 11 on NVMe, no additional work necessary.

[RottenKillSwitch]

On 1/10/2022 at 10:14 PM, StalePie42 said:

Hello i was interested in dual booting windows and popos on my new build on two separate drives but all the tutorials i find show different things i was wondering if there was an easy way to dual boot the two without having to do any complicated command line stuff 

thanks in advance

Yes, there is an easy way to install Linux with dual boot.

Assuming you have a single disk with a single volume dedicated to Windows (along with Recovery and Windows EFI volumes), shrink the C volume, leaving an unallocated volume of atleast 20GB or more.

Now, boot into a Linux live boot, open the installation, select manual partitioning, and create two partitions: an EFI System Partition of size 512MiB with the mountpoint set as /boot/efi and a single ext4 or btrfs partition of the remaining size off 20GB(say) unallocated volume, with mountpoint set as / (yes, slash only, "/" stands for root) or reserve around some amounts of storage for swap (check below for more).

 

Now, about the swap volume:
Assuming that you have over 16GB of RAM, swap isn't generally required, although, if you have a lesser amount of RAM or do processes that use a lot of RAM, yes, add in an extra swap volume. (Swapping could be costly for SSDs and also potentially wear them at a slightly faster rate).

I have used my system with swap previously and found that swap usage in my Linux session is zero, why, because I have 16gigs or RAM, my workflow does not involve anything that uses over 12GB of RAM and I do not hibernate my system, I use sleep/standby.

(Use a calculator for planning your partition, it really is helpful in planning partitions beforehand).

 

So, assuming you have around 8GB of RAM, 20GB of unallocated space for linux, your partition via manual partitioning would be something like this:

 

Partition type/ filesystem-------Partition size------Mountpoint
EFI System Partition-------------- 512 MiB ----------- /boot/efi
swap---------------------------------- 4GB ---------------- 
ext4 partition------------------------ 15.5GB ------------ /

(Use a calculator!!)

More on swap space: Chapter 12. Getting started with swap Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 | Red Hat Customer Portal

Need more help? Feel free to reply/dm

My disk partition, by the way (I have am not using any swap space, explained above


 

Edited February 15, 2022 by RottenKillSwitch