[kwlug-disc] Adventures in dual boot land...

[Sandeep Johri]

Based on my 'limited understanding' of the issues you faced - thought
I'd share my success story.

I installed windows first on a separate hard drive - like you did.

I thereafter installed Linux (Antergos) on a second hard drive which is
where grub was installed too.  While installing Grub - Windows 10 was
recognized and configured.

Thereafter in the pc bios settings - I made the Linux Drive as my boot
drive.  Not had any issues so far and can boot into Linux or Windows. 
My understanding is that any widows 10 updates touch the windows 10
drive only and any Antergos updates including grub updates, touch the
Linux drive only.  I also have the option of booting directly into
windows 10 (via the bios) if needed - I haven't done that in a while. 
Just to reiterate - these are separate hard drives as opposed to
separate partitions.  Additionally I had installed Windows 7 first and
upgraded to Windows 10 - not sure if that makes a difference.

Thanks

Sandeep

From:
Sandeep Johri

On 07/02/17 06:44 PM, B.S. wrote:
> Good to know, thanks Jeff.
>
> Did you have to do anything else in the BIOS? e.g. Setting the M.2 to
> be the primary boot, so / and the grub install there chaining to the
> Windows drive when that option selected in the boot (grub) menu?
>
> Setting up that way has given me issues in the past that I don't think
> I ever quite sorted out - I believe Windows got unhappy as it was then
> the second drive in the machine, wanted / thought it was the first ...
> and unhappiness ensued.
>
> I believe I ended up giving up on the grub chained boot idea and
> instead pressing the select boot device bios option, when I needed
> Windows.
>
> Did you run into / surmount that?
>
> (And, any hurdles you had to work through in enabling encryption, etc.?)
>
>
> On 02/07/2017 01:17 PM, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
>> A couple of months ago I picked up an M.2 drive for my main desktop,
>> with
>> the intention of loading Ubuntu on it for a dual boot setup with
>> Windows 10
>> on the other drives.  It's part of my big plan to completely eliminate
>> Windows from my systems.
>>
>> Last time I did a dual boot was when Microsoft first started pushing
>> EFI/UEFI/Secure Boot and that sort of stuff.  The solution at the
>> time was
>> to turn these features off in the BIOS if you wanted to install
>> Linux.  So
>> I did the same thing this time around when I tried to install Ubuntu
>> on the
>> M.2.
>>
>> So the setup is:
>>
>> /dev/sda is the Windows 10 SSD
>> /dev/sdb is a 1TB HDD for the Windows side
>> /dev/sdc is the new M.2 for Ubuntu
>> /dev/sdd is the USB stick for installing Ubuntu from (and of course only
>> temporary)
>>
>> I ran in to nothing but trouble with this on this install.  Ubuntu
>> seems to
>> install fine, for the most part, but it always failed when it came
>> time to
>> writing GRUB on the Windows 10 disk. I tried going with different
>> sorts of
>> partitioning schemes, using GParted to set up the linux side prior to
>> installation, I even tried other distros such as Fedora to install. 
>> Just
>> couldn't get past the "writing GRUB" part.
>>
>> Some help sites suggested letting the install finish sans GRUB, but I
>> couldn't even do that as the install wouldn't get past this error
>> without a
>> hard reboot.
>>
>> So, with nothing else to think of, I turned on the EFI stuff in the
>> BIOS,
>> and sure enough, Ubuntu was able to write GRUB to the Windows 10
>> drive with
>> no problems.  I now have a working dual boot configuration (and as a
>> bonus,
>> I haven't booted into Windows since the install).
>>
>> I mentioned this to a few friends of mine and one of them seems to think
>> that the new M.2 drives require EFI (or UEFI, whatever) to be turned
>> on for
>> proper operation, but I haven't been able to confirm this yet.
>>
>> So I post this to the group in case anyone else out there is having
>> dual-boot issues involving Windows 10 or M.2 drives.  It's one of
>> those "I
>> don't know why it works, but it does" situations.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> kwlug-disc mailing list
>> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
>> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> kwlug-disc mailing list
> kwlug-disc at kwlug.org
> http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org
>
>