Dual booting off 2 different drives

[sprawl]

Hi Kubuntu forums,

Another newbie thread here. First of all, I'm new to Linux and have been on Windows all my life. I'm currently running windows 8.1 off a 128 gb ssd connected to a mSATA port. I also have a mecanical drive for storage connected to a sata port. My laptop has an additional sata port available.

Im looking to buy an additional ssd and connect this to the free sata port. My plan is to install Kubuntu on this and dual boot Kubuntu and Windows. This seems like the most hassle free setup to me, as the only thing I would have to do is to select which drive to boot in bios on startup and not have to mess with the Windows drive.

My questions are:

1. Is this a sound plan, or am I missing something major?

2. I read somewhere that you have to disconnect the Windows drive from the system when installing an additional OS on a new drive. Is this true?

3. I have allready tried dual booting Kubuntu and Windows one the single ssd i have. That did not work, as it screwed up the bootloader and as a result i had to spend the evening reinstalling Windows. When I did the install off a liveUSB i noticed that I did not have the option to install Kubuntu on my mechanical drive. Could this be related to question 2?

4. Do I risk damaging the Windows drive when I disconnect it, if I do have to do this?

5. Does Kubuntu install something on the motherbord in installation, which could potentionally srew up the booting of Windows drive?

Thanks in advance!
Sprawl

[jpenguin]

1 it works for me
2 no, just pay attention to be sure you install and format the correct drive
3 idk what you mean
4. There's a small risk when moving a mechanical drive, ssd should be fine
5 nope, nothing ever installs to mobo. You'll want to make sure your bootlooder installs to your Linux drive, afterwards set that to boot in your bios- if you can't boot windows, add an option to chainload your first drive

Sent from my XT901 using Tapatalk

[sprawl]

Thanks for your informative reply, jpenguin. I'll give this a go then, and drop a reply here when I'm set up.

[oshunluvr]

The dual-drive/dual-boot setup is the best way to go. It's even simpler that you imagine. You will not have to access BIOS every time you want windows because Kubuntu will boot windows just fine. Then, once you're all setup, boot into Winodws 8 and setup it's boot loader to boot Kubuntu. There's a free program that makes it easy called EasyBCD. Then you set your BIOS to boot to whichever you use the most.

To file share, you'll want to have either a linux data partition that is ntfs formatted (and link your Documents, Pictures, Music folders - etc.) or install EXT2FSD in Windows and access the files that way.

[sprawl]

The dual-drive/dual-boot setup is the best way to go. It's even simpler that you imagine. You will not have to access BIOS every time you want windows because Kubuntu will boot windows just fine. Then, once you're all setup, boot into Winodws 8 and setup it's boot loader to boot Kubuntu. There's a free program that makes it easy called EasyBCD. Then you set your BIOS to boot to whichever you use the most.

To file share, you'll want to have either a linux data partition that is ntfs formatted (and link your Documents, Pictures, Music folders - etc.) or install EXT2FSD in Windows and access the files that way.

Great, thanks for the additional information! I'm really looking forward to start using Linux and this setup seems perfect for me.

[sprawl]

One month later I'm finally set up. For anyone looking up this thread in the future I'm going to post exactly what I did, since I think the information on this specific topic is a bit sparse on the web. I ended up with Mint instead of Kubuntu, but the steps I took should be identical.


What I did before installation:
1. Inserted the blank, unformatted 120GB SSD into the remaining SATA port.
2. Disabled fast boot in Windows power settings.
3. Made sure UEFI was off, which it was by default in my case (I'm on a Clevo barebone notebook).
4. Disabled Intel rapid start in BIOS (which made the computer stutter and turn off instead of rebooting, which really scared me. Everything was fine though).


How I installed:
1. Booted Linux from a live USB stick.
2. Did not unmount mounted partitions when prompted by the installer. (a pop-up which occurred right after selecting language).
3. Selected "something else".
4. Took notice that all three drives where connected and functional. (my mSATA ssd with Windows was dev/sdc, the mechanical storage drive was dev/sda, the new SATA3 SSD was dev/sdb)


5. Created a new partition table on sdb, checking 3 times that I clicked the correct device.
6. Made an ext4 / (root) partiition of 20GB
7. Made a swap partition of 16GB (doubling my ram).
8. Made a ext4 /home/ partition using the remaining space (~80GB)
9. Made sure that the bootloader was installed to the new SSD.
10. Clicked Install now and filled in all the information during the installation process.


Post installation:
Windows was booted on the first boot, since BIOS was set to boot the mSATA disk as #1. Everything was fine with Windows and both the mSATA SSD and the mechanical drive seemed untouched.


I then changed the boot priorities in BIOS, and after this the Linux SSD booted into Grub. Grub presented me with booting Linux, running memory tests, AND GAVE ME THE OPTION OF BOOTING WINDOWS. After some testing I have concluded that everything has gone well with the installation and that Grub boots both Linux and Windows perfectly.


The complete installation and setup process took me about 1 hour, excluding making backups and all the reading I did to understand Linux partitioning and other topics related to the installation.


That's all, I hope this has been useful to someone.
/Sprawl

[mr_raider]

16gb is a bit much for swap. 1x RAM is enough if you hibernate. If not, with a system ram of 8 gigs, you barely need any swap. Ssd space is precious. Don't waste it.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[sprawl]

16gb is a bit much for swap. 1x RAM is enough if you hibernate. If not, with a system ram of 8 gigs, you barely need any swap. Ssd space is precious. Don't waste it.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

I fully admit that I wasn't sure about how much space to allocate to swap. Is it possbile to change this down to 8 gigs post installation, for instance with gparted?

[oshunluvr]

I fully admit that I wasn't sure about how much space to allocate to swap. Is it possbile to change this down to 8 gigs post installation, for instance with gparted?

Yes. Simply boot gparted, shrink the partition, and then decide how to re-allocate it. Unfortunately, if you want to add it to /home you'll have to move the entire partition "to the left" and then expand it "to the right", but since you likely have very little in it thus far - it shouldn't take too long.

I'm not sure if I would go below 8GB (matching your RAM) as I believe that much could be required to hibernate.

Another alternative to resizing: Mount /tmp in RAM. Then anytime your /tmp starts to fill RAM, it uses swap space instead of a running program. This can speed up you system a bit too because /tmp is not on a drive.

Try it out before resizing. In /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=1777 0 0