Hi everyone, I am wanting to gradually make the switch from windows to Linux on my daily use desktop. I figured the best way would be to dual boot them. I have a spare drive in my desktop that I cleaned for Linux so I can have it on a separate drive from windows. Here the process I went through which ended up being unsuccessful. Removed windows drive, installed mint on seperate SSD, install was successful, installed steam and tried some games, shut down PC, put windows drive back in PC, PC wouldn't boot to windows drive but was still booting to mint, went into BIOS and selected boot over ride to windows drive, still wouldn't boot, created windows recovery USB, tried to fix boot in recovery mode, recovery media wasn't able to fix boot, booted into mint, mounted windows drive and removed all the documents I needed to external drive, nuked windows and Linux drives and did a fresh install of windows.
Afterward, I googled how to do this properly. And the posts I found detailed basically the same process I did. I would like to try again but I don't know what I did wrong and don't want to have to go through that again.
Thanks.
PS. I have an extensive library in steam already. There's several games that I have hours into and have friends that I play with, which is why I want to keep windows for the time being while I figure out how Linux gaming works.
EDIT: thanks for all the comments. It appears my problem was when I removed my windows drive from my PC when installing mint. I will try again and keep both drives in my PC. Thanks!
EDIT 2: UPDATE: I have successfully dual booted windows 10 and linux mint. After thinking about my problem for a while, i remembered an important detail. When I first built my PC, I had windows installed on a 120gb Kingston ssd. I then later purchased an M.2 and installed windows on there. That Kingston ssd is what i wiped and put linux on, so i'm thinking maybe the bootloader stayed on the kingston drive?? i'm not exactly sure, but after watching this video, I was confident that my original plan would work this time since i did a clean wipe of both drives and did a fresh install of windows on the M.2. I am now able to boot into windows 10 and Mint from the bios with no issues. Thanks everyone for your help.
SOLVED TLDR: you can dual boot windows and linux on 2 separate drives, and it is perfectly safe (and recommended in the video i linked) to remove the windows drive from the PC, while installing linux on another drive.
There’s no need to do all that. Here’s how to do it the old way, which works perfectly and will not cause you a problem:
Turn off bitlocker
If you’re gonna dual boot off the same drive, shrink your windows partition in disk manager so there’s enough space for Linux.
Boot your Linux install media
Go through the process like normal, but be sure to choose where you want to put Linux. In a lot of em the option to pick is “install alongside windows”.
It just works.
You will have a problem sometimes where a windows update deletes the bootloader that lets you pick between Linux and windows, resulting in you booting straight into windows with no choice. People say a lot of things about how to prevent this, but the better solution is to know how to fix it. Your distribution will have instructions just search “fix grub”. Usually the solution is to boot a usb and run some command. The command is slightly different depending on the distro.
A person I know has it written in sharpie on her recovery usb.
Eventually your friends will puke on the kitchen floor. Rather than try to keep it from ever happening, just keep a mop and bucket in the closet like a normal person.
Anyway if you have any questions lmk.
Thanks for the response. That is really helpful. I am going to try again and hopefully it will work better this time.
If you want to know what choice to pick at some point in the process, tell me your windows version and Linux distribution and I’ll mock it up in a vm and see what happens.
That's very generous. I was planning on using windows 10 and Linux mint. But I was doing some research and it seems like bazzite is more focused towards gaming and I wasn't sure if I should use that instead of mint.
It doesn’t matter what you pick, there’s so much to learn and so much grass is greener thought process going on that barring a irl group to conform to or workplace requirement you’re gonna try a million different things before you figure it out.
If you use mint, the step you need to pay attention during and read instructions for asks if you wanna “install alongside windows”.
Just make sure you recognize the drive/partition you want to use and if you don’t, take note of the way the installer describes them and figure out which one is which.
If you decide to go with bazzite I can check out how that one presents the choice too.
That's good to know. I would prefer using mint because I've been using it in my laptop for a while now and I'm comfortable with it. I really appreciate your help and time answering my questions. I will try dual booting again this weekend.
Thanks for your help with my problem. I ultimately decided to retry my method due to a video I found detailing the method and it worked. I updated my OP to include more details if you wanna read what I did. But I did successfully dual boot onto 2 separate drives.