Preparing to overwrite current linux mint on a dual boot system with Windows 7

[Guest]

Hello all

I am currently a Linux mint 18 user on a dual boot system with windows 7. This is a non uefi system with 2 physical hard disks. Windows 7 is on first disk and Linux mint on second disk and currently able to dual boot. The second disk partions as a root / partion. A swap partition and a /home partition. I would like to overwrite Linus mint with Kubuntu 16.04.2 LTS preserving dual boot capability. Any installation guide or information would be much appreciated.

Take care.

[simonsaysthis]

You need to select the mint partitions and make sure that they get mounted with the same flags showing what is root, swap, home respectively. What you do is select these partitions as being formatted and then tagged again with the same label. The one things that one needs to watch out for is understanding where the bootloader sits. It might get wiped so that only Kubuntu or Windows will boot and then might need to get fixed post install. As long as you have your data backed up and you don't touch your Windows partitions during install there shouldnt be a massive risk of making your system unrepairable.

Maybe better: Google Installing Ubuntu in dual boot from Windows. The only difference will be that you already have a number of Linux partitions which you can delete prior to following the steps. There is a lot of documentation on the internet.

[chimak111]

You could provide the output of

sudo fdisk -l

and

sudo parted -l

so that people can guide you better.

[oshunluvr]

The only question to answer is; Can you select which drive to boot to from your BIOS boot menu? Assuming you can, this is a piece of cake.

To install Kubuntu over Mint, use "Manual" when you get to the partitioning stage and select the same partitions for root and home as you did with Mint (swap will automatically be detected and enabled). Make sure you tick the "Format" box for the root partition. If you have files you want to preserve in your Mint home, do not tick "format" for the home partition. Then, select your boot device as the Linux drive and install away.

In your BIOS, set your Linux drive as the default boot device and use the Grub menu to select Windows when you need to go there.

Having two drives is really the best setup for dual booting Windows with Linux because both drives can be bootable. Let Windows have it's drive and be able to boot from there and let Linux boot from the other drive.