Is Dual booting really that "dangerous"

[Arika]

I've been considering dual booting my PC with some form of Linux or android (which is still technically linux depending on which one you use) but a lot of places are saying that it can mess up both OS's and you will be unable to access either of them if the boot loader screws up. Is it really that common? what kind of things would cause such an issue?

 

I would likely just install it on a fast USB drive so i can disconnect it instead of having to partition my drive. Would this alleviate the above issue if it even is that much of an issue?

[Daniel1]

If you are afraid of dual booting then just use a virtual machine. 

[Arika]

Just now, Dan1 said:

If you are afraid of dual booting then just use a virtual machine. 

that was my other thought, how much of a performance hit does a VM take over native?

[Daniel1]

Just now, Arika S said:

that was my other thought, how much of a performance hit does a VM take over native?

It depends on your computer which is running the virtual machine.

[Drak3]

The issue of dual booting boils down to the boot partition getting formatted or the boot loader becoming corrupt. Either leave user data recoverable, it's just a pain in the ass. The first is easy to avoid, just don't go around reformatting anything with GParted without some backups. The latter can happen regardless of dual boot.

 

Live booting aleviates either issue, since the bootloader doesn't change, but you also have to reinstall everything on that live boot if you don't have a persistant storage solution set up (ie installing Linux directly on the USB stick the same way you would on an HDD).

 

The best methods, IMO are:

Dual boot with 2 independant disks. Windows as its own, Linux as its own. Set your BIOS to use the Linux disk (likely GRUB2) and manually add in an entry for the Windows disk to that Linux bootloader.

Hyper-V in Windows. I've had the best performance with VMs in Windows using Hyper-V. You'll probably need to install some VM optimizations and use the CLI to change resolution.

KVM in Linux.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 minutes ago, Arika S said:

that was my other thought, how much of a performance hit does a VM take over native?

normally about 3%, its very small

16 minutes ago, Arika S said:

it can mess up both OS's and you will be unable to access either of them if the boot loader screws up. Is it really that common? what kind of things would cause such an issue?

It can, but unlikely to happen if you know what your doing and follow common practices.

 

Also just restore backups if there are issues.

[Arika]

8 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

The best methods, IMO are:

Dual boot with 2 independant disks. Windows as its own, Linux as its own. Set your BIOS to use the Linux disk (likely GRUB2) and manually add in an entry for the Windows disk to that Linux bootloader.

Hyper-V in Windows. I've had the best performance with VMs in Windows using Hyper-V. You'll probably need to install some VM optimizations and use the CLI to change resolution.

KVM in Linux.

In the situation that i use a USB drive for the entire linux OS and just plug it in when i need and and manually change the boot order in the BIOS, or mash f8 until it gives me the option of boot device each time, does this interact with the boot loader partition or is this all at BIOS/UEFI level?

[Drak3]

Just now, Arika S said:

does this interact with the boot loader partition

No. It'll only use the USB disk until you're in the OS. Once you're in, you can interact with any and all HDD/SSDs in your system if you want.

 

But there is a performance penalty for running it off of anything less than an actual external SSD.

[Z3R0 CHANC3]

I've used dual disks for decades with GRUB and have never had any issue.

[EPENEX]

I have not had any problems I couldn't fix while dual-booting, but you can definitely run into issues that will negatively impact you. It may be better for some people to use 2 different drives, one with Windows, and the other with GNU/Linux. You could then boot from which drive you wish without worrying about boot loaders or Windows messing up your other partitions.

[18358414]

Dual-booting Windows 10/Arch Linux with Grub 2.  For the most part, these days, if a dual-boot setup goes wrong the way to fix it is to just try it again.  If you have Windows contained in its own little partition it can't much do anything to hurt your Linux partition and vice versa (unless you mount the partition).  I have mine set up with a separate boot partition so that Grub is separated from the Linux and Windows partitions entirely so that when booting it just loads Grub and the boot partition and doesn't need to touch the other two until it's actually booting. 

 

That said, I've bollocks'd it up a few times.  I've messed up my boot partition and had to reinstall grub, I've swapped motherboards and had an "operating system not found" error.  The great thing is: you can still fix it even if you can't boot to the root hard drive.  Just boot to a live cd, mount & chroot the boot and root partitions (arch-chroot in the arch environment), reinstall grub as normal or edit config files (once you've chroot-ed into your root partition it's almost like running natively again). 

 

I'd recommend dual booting for anyone who can survive if their system is out for a day or so while they learn how to recover their boot partition or if they already know how making it a trivial case.  If it's more to the tune of a mission-critical daily driver, maybe set up a VM and possibly play around with dual-booting within a VM.  VMs will take a performance hit over native hardware, but also provide the least opportunity for the system to get in a non-booting state.

[jpenguin]

Win10 tends to overwrite the bootload, it's not hard to use a supergrub USB/cd to boot.

[Kitty47]

when I was way younger I didnt know you had to partition. So I installed linux and deleted everything I had. lol

[suchamoneypit]

If you know what you are doing, its definitely fine, but my first time I was still pretty good with computers but on several occasions I did something that messed up my mbr on my drive or I corrupted an install. Which was annoying, but I learned to store important files on a secondary drive and use my main one as a high speed swap thats not that important (I have 3 SSDs, and 2 HDDs). My HDDs I treat like my forever persistent storage whereas my SSDs are disposable files and installs. This change of way of storage and recent things like steamplay really have me thinking of going back to a dual-boot.