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Best way to dual boot laptop - Linux and Windows (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.world
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I'm looking to install Linux on our home laptop and see if I can convince my wife to migrate off Windows. Since I'm not sure there won't be times we need or want to boot back into Windows, I want to set it up so we can dual boot. The laptop only has a spot for one drive however so I can't use two drives and chose them with the bios. I know in the past Windows has been problematic with dual boot setups on a single drive, corrupting the boot drive following updates and what-not. I'd really like to avoid that if possible.

Any suggestions on how best to go about it, or something I should at least avoid because it's known to be problematic?

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[–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Agreed on other recommendations to test with a live environment via USB drive first.

If you decide after that to proceed with a dual boot, I wouldn't worry as much about Windows breaking it these days. I have a Windows 11 dual boot on a Dell laptop. It has had Debian, Fedora and now openSUSE Tumbleweed as my main OS for some time. I have gone through around 3 years of Windows updates and there haven't been any problems with that.

In my case I reinstalled Windows 11 first, reducing the size of the Windows system partition. I created a shared NTFS partition at the end of the drive and then installed Linux with / and /home partitions in the middle of the disk.

You could check Disk Management in Windows to see how much you can shrink your system partition. If it gives you enough space that's worth a try as a first step.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I've worked with a live environment USB drive a few times but found the drives to be too slow for substantial use. The laptop is an old Toshiba Satellite running Windows 10 with an old Intel 47xx and 12GB of memory. Works fine but obviously trying to leave Windows. App-wise, I know my wife is going to want to use Microsoft Word and Excel, and we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax. Disk-wise, I bought a new 1TB SSD to use for this and as it currently only has a 256GB drive, I'll have plenty of room for partitions.

    Interesting strategy having Windows partitions at the beginning and end of the drive. Was that intentional to maybe make Windows not notice Linux? What boot manager are you using? The fact that you've went so long without issue certainly makes it sound like a good way to avoid Windows messing things up, but maybe your boot manager does a better job than others too.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's just GRUB for boot on this PC, and that's how I'm selecting Windows or Linux - in the GRUB menu. This might break if I did a Windows version upgrade, but so far feature updates are not a problem.

    I don't think the placement of the partitions mattered much from a technical standpoint. I just liked the idea of a shared data partition at the end.

    But yeah, if you're thinking about just jumping from the current setup to the 1TB SSD it would be pretty easy to use dd to clone old to new by doing a live boot from USB and having the new drive in an external enclosure (the command would be something like dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=64K status=progress - but double-check which drive id is used for each by comparing the names and sizes with lsblk first). That will copy the current disk contents to the first 256 GB of the new drive and leave the rest as free space. Swap in the new drive and test to be sure it boots to Windows. Then boot using Linux install media of your choice and install to the free space. If you're not sure about the distro yet, you might want to have a separate /home to make it easier to try other flavors without wiping out your user files.

    If anything goes south you'll have the original drive to swap in and get to Windows.

    Running MS Office in Linux will be a headache unless you have a very old full install version (not the current click-to-run tech). I would recommend giving Libre Office apps a try to replace Microsoft Office. I've found both Writer and Calc to have great compatibility with Microsoft features, and their UI is very intuitive. I only saw Excel workbooks have problems in Calc where very proprietary features were in use, like online stock quotes through the Microsoft back-end, and things like sparklines. Pretty complex formulas on a very large workbook were no problem. If either of you are using MS Office apps for work then definitely test compatibility before you make the jump. You can test that on Windows since Libre Office works on both Windows and Linux.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thank you for the reply. I only know enough about dd to know I don't know enough to be doing anything with it, but I might try it anyway. 😀 I can clone the old to new drive using Macrium Reflect but not sure if that might impact the Linux install that follows... I assume not.

    Anyway, thank you again for sharing so many details.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    You can do it. The main thing to watch out for is correct in and out device names. If you switch them it's not going to warn you before overwriting the current drive with the emptiness of the new drive!

    Also, you'll need to sudo that command. But lsblk is something you can do as a regular user.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    we always use this laptop for our taxes, so TurboTax. Disk-wise

    Independent of your experiements with Linux, it may be a good idea to switch away from turbotax. They've been lobbying to make filing taxes harder for the past 20 years.

    More relevant to the Linux discussion at hand, they're locked into a specific operating system, whereas the alternatives are much more modern and work just fine in a regular web browser. I've had good success across three states with freetaxusa, personally.

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