Just want to say that I have been dual booting Linux and windows for years, and I've had very few problems. I use Linux for over 95 % of the time, but for work or other specific tasks, I just need windows every once in a while. A few notes, if you want to do it. 1 - have a long think about how much space each OS should have, running out of space sucks. 2 - Install windows first, then Linux, then the Linux installer can help you a lot, doing it the other way around is a major hassle. 3 - turn off the quick start up mode that basically hyphenates windows rather than actually close it, otherwise you can not access the files from windows in Linux, and could possibly bypass the boot menu. 4 - get a program for windows to access your Linux files. That being said, if you don't actually need windows, get rid of it, but if you do, in my opinion it is not that hard to make it work.
I've had Windows and 2 or three different Linux distros multi-booting without problems, back when I was still young and dumb and hadn't committed to a favourite distro. Nowadays if I want to experiment with a distro - it's a VM. Never had a problem I couldn't track back to overenthusiasm and underthinking. Having said the above - I would do it again, BUT I WOULD NEVER, EVER UNDERTAKE TO SUPPORT SOMEONE REMOTELY WHO HAD DONE IT.
I have..like you Simon, had a dual boot system with windows 7 and Linux Mint for at least 4 years without ONE single problem...I have to have windows to run my SDR play radio, since Linux does not have and will not have the software to do that...I would have thought by now...(I really dont know how long) that alot more company's would start using Linux than they do...and that, Im sure is the only reason alot of people dual boot.
@Simon AIs Nielsen.. ''4 - get a program for windows to access your Linux files.'' .what exactly would that program be? googlin' around haven't ran across one that would some how make Win7 'see' the Ubuntu on another drive...
I have sold dual boot systems and have never had an issue. Sometimes Linux takes over my booting software but then you just choose which one you want to boot through Grub. Grub is less elegant than the Windows dual booting program I use. In additon, no way to sell an elegant presentation through UEFI. BTW, I use Linux Mint 90 percent of the time on my triple boot system, all Linux distros. I have a Windows 8.1 system as well dual booted with Zorin.
At the end of the day, one must decide what level of risk they're willing to face. weigh the risks vs. reward.You make a serious and important point sir. Thanks for the critical effort to educate.
Unless you have a GPU that has a shitty Linux driver, or Wine not supporting your game or other software very well. There's plenty of reasons to keep Windows up. For me, it's music production and sometimes gaming, but for other things, Ubuntu. I'm probably on Windows 10% of the time.
ch3atcode Valve has started pushing gaming on Linux with their Debian based SteamOS and a fair bit of my steam library is available on my Linux machine The Vulcan graphics api is also generating some competition for Microsoft's DirectX api and is set to replace OpenGL in the gaming world Other game launchers like Origin don't seem to have embraced Linux so far though
I have been dual booting for the past 5+ years on my laptop. I have updated Windows 7 to 10 and updated Xubuntu twice now up to 14.10 never had any problems. Maybe I've just been lucky!
Just wanted to say that I think your videos are absolutely informative and I love how to talk to people you don't talk at them. I'm definitely looking forward to more of your work and you've definitely got another subscriber.
You make good points in this video. I'd love to have seperate computers for Windows and Linux, but that'll have to wait a while yet. I've been looking into dual-booting and this video, and especially the comment section, have been sources of invaluable information, and have shown me what I need to search for to get it done right. Thanks everyone!
Excellent explanation, Joe. I worked in service documentation of UNIX systems for 15 years, and your video could be the basis of a course in supportability: 1) The problem of giving new users a choice (whether to dual boot), without letting them know about the dangers down the line. 2) The difference between normal users (the 99%), and those of us who thrive on technical details. We technical people have to get out of our shells and realize that what works for us often does not work for most other people. 3) The inherent instability and risk of trying to get two disparate systems (Windows and Linux) to work together, when each of the systems will be undergoing major updates. This configuration is an automatic red flag for systems designers. 4) As you say several times in the comments - if you want to dual-boot, go for it, as long as you understand the risks and take precautions.
It is great that there are people like Joe Collins out there. As a long time Linux user, I come across a lot of computer users complaining about this and that with their windows installation. When you tell them there are other OS options they can use, they look at you like you have two heads or are from another planet. My most recent was a neighbor that came to me with 199 different computer problems. Of course all were windows related. After a long, long talk, I gave him a DVD with a LIVE version of the latest Ubuntu to try out. After I held his hand , showed him how to install the DVD and run Ubuntu, he had the opportunity to try it and it did everything he wanted and needed to do. His main concern was that he wanted to be able to run future windows based programs and will Linux do it??? Of course he went to Best Buy and was told they did not recommend he erased windows from his machine. Kinda makes sense, they charge him an arm and two legs every time he brings them his computer to fix software related issues. Needless to say, this neighbor is still using windows today.
I dual boot, its stable enough but has its issues, I hope that I can find alternatives to all of the programs that I need on Windows so I can go to Linux full time
i have 3 hdd of 500GB/ea and I have installed 1. windows 7 2. ubuntu 3. kali linux 4. phoenix os and I haven't had any problem jumping from one os to another. I love your videos man, keep it up
What a great video! You've managed to articulate the issues that have bugged me for many years (been in 'IT' since the mid 70s (Apple II, PET, Trash80 etc.)) and have never seen a good, long-term (emphasis on Long-Term) implementation of dual-boot systems. Absolutely agree the best way forward is with physically separate drives, or a "caddy' system, plug-in drive bay. For anyone thinking about it, Linux distros have come a very long way since the 'complicated terminal' days, and have matured amazingly. If you're looking for a free alternative to 'commercial' (your hardware belongs to us) OS, have a look, you'll be very pleasantly surprised (and hard drives really aren't that expensive now) :) Great vids. Thank you.
Great videos, yeah i used to do the dual boot thing all the time when i did penetration testing. Your totally right, its never stayed stable. Switiching back and forth is so bad over time, your SO right about that. I stopped doing it. Thanks, keep up the great work.
I tried dual booting years ago, when I was first learning about linux. Now I have seperate systems and don't dual boot. I have my Mac and I have the PC i purposed as the media server that runs linux. I've had rock solid results doing it this way, and in fact, I forget the server is running sometimes because it just sits there. I know it's on because the power button lights up. Anyway think some great solid points were made in this video. I enjoy using multiple operating systems on different hardware configurations. I find you gain more knowledge that way instead of sticking to a single platform.
My 6 year old HP Pavillion laptop that I bought a year ago with Mint 17.1 on it up and died on me recently So I picked up a refurbished HP Elitebook 8460p that came with Windows 10 on it that I could wipe and replace with Mint 17.3 Cinnamon. But then I got thinking that maybe I should do a dual boot instead. About that time I am learning about Microsoft's apparently adopting a North Korea like heavy handed form of customer disregard, manipulation and blatant disrespect of privacy (We want to know all about you because we know what's best for you) . Then I came across your excellent Dual Boot Deception and...well ...that settled it. It was, with a great deal of satisfaction, that I placed a DBan disk in my optical drive and wiped clean any remaining relationship I had with Windows replacing it with Linux Mint 17.3 . Thank you, Joe, not only for Dual Boot Deception but also for your other informative and very helpful videos as well.
+lmull3 Not if you already invested a huge amount of money in building your PC. You still need to run Windows natively for gaming to utilize its power.
+lmull3 For most people money is limited and I for one wouldn't want to use a have to use a shitty cheap computer for most of my computing needs, just so that I can use my powerful system for Windows exclusively. And I do have two computers - one is an old laptop and I'd rather not use it for anything while at home if I can avoid it, since it is painfully slow.
Well Linux doesn't need full access to all your hardware. My VM for Linux Mint is a dual core 4 gb of ram system and runs plenty fast with little to no hanging up. I'm only using Linux for secure web browsing and playing around to further expose myself to the system. Most everything else is just done through Windows which is the host OS.
Very good points but I haven't ran into any problem with DB. For many years, I have never seen a windows update rewrite the boot loader unless of course, you switch windows OS ( that said, I don't know what happen if you upgrade your windows OS with a Linux system present, to windows 10 ). Neither a Linux update, even a kernel update, damage Windows. For gamer, until the "big" games are ported to it, dual boot is a must. Getting another computer just to run Linux as your main computer or another hard drive and installing it, is not a financial option for the first, or a technical option for the second, for a lot of people. It is way simpler to DB. Sorry but it is not the "demon" as you presented. They don't interfere with each other once booted. I do have an ntfs partition which can share data between them. As for the "clock" thing, I think it's finally resolved with the latest Linux distros. I don't have to change clock anymore. P.S not that I want to be mean, but for a technical person like yourself, getting virus every month on windows is a bit far fetch.
+armagedon515 You missed the point of the video, I'm afraid. You are a technical person, most new users are not. I was talking about new users who don't understand how this all works. As I said at the beginning, you can do with your PC whatever you want. I just don't support dual boot for novice users. :)
+armagedon515 hi there, dual booter here with ubuntu 14.04 and win10... which I wish I could downgrade at this point. but that's besides the point. just here to share that I upgraded from win8.1 to 10 on the same disk as my ubuntu install and that I had no problems with my own particular upgrade. so it can be done
+Ohmyginger - Yeah, it works most of the time but sometimes it doesn't and when it doesn't it's a pain to fix. As long as your aware of that fact and are ready to deal with it then it's fine.
Thanks JC. I myself, have two separate hard drives - one with Win7 and the other with Linux both booting independently through bios. I have my bios setup to automatically boot Linux first (boot order #1). If I need to go to windows which I unfortunately need to on occasion because of work related stuff, I hit F2 during the boot process and change the order of the boot drives so that the windows drive boots first. I know there's probably a more efficient method of doing it through grub or something but I go to that Win7 drive so infrequently it doesn't matter AND it just works for me and I like it. Hopefully, one day I will be able to turn my Win7 drive into "storage" as you have you done ;) Cheers!
The way I do dual-boot: I keep the Windows boot-loader on the MBR and GRUB on the Linux partition so they don't interfere with each-other. And I modify the Windows boot-loader to recognize Linux through EasyBCD. Works gr8. But I had many failures until I learned the safe way to do it. So knowledge is power.
Though I agree with you that things can get very confusing and go very wrong pretty quickly but the biggest benefit for most people is being able to have the best of both worlds. I've install Linux as dual boot on many machines for many people and the only problem I've ran into was when all 4 primary partitions were used by the manufacture. That was a neat little trick I thought. Another problem I had was when a person I installed dual boot for decided he didn't want it on his machine anymore. What it all boils down to is anything we decide to do in life isn't always easy. For me the knowledge I get from trial and error is priceless. I still have Windows on one machine just so I could boot it up once a year to do my taxes. Also Ive stuck it out with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. For me it's the only distro I've ever liked. Great video BTW :-)
Really great video. I asked a friend who introduced Linux to me if I would be able to see and use my external hard drives with Linux and he said no, I should do a dual boot instead. And while I understood about 80% of what you said, I can see how it could easily be confusing to someone like me who isn't a 'techy' person. I planned to make my PC a linux and keep my laptop Windows just in case... as long as I can see my external HDDs as they have my movies on it. So I haven't made the switch yet.
I've been dual booting for years now. The first time I tried it, it became a nightmare. However, I've learned some solutions and my pc's are just as stable as any other system Tips: Install Windows first. Windows will sometimes write the BCD (Windows bootloader) on multiple drives in a BIOS environment. If you are reinstalling windows, just be ready to reinstall GRUB if needed. Howto Reinstall GRUB: 1) boot into a linux install cd/usb 2) mount linux root partition to /mnt 3) mount boot linux partition to /mnt/boot 4) chroot or arch-chroot (Arch linux) to /mnt 4) grub-install or whatever you need to do to reinstall grub... Get Windows as a grub boot option: Install os-prober package re-run grub-mkconfig Also /etc/default/grub has more grub options Learn grub command line: The command list in grub is short. You can usually type 'c' or something similar to get into the shell. Then type 'h' for help UEFI: Some newer machines prefer EFI. These machines have multiple schemes to operate. More quality Lenovo's allow windows and Linux to install boot variables into the motherboard firmware. These are great as they avoid the issue of Windows overwriting grub with bcd. You should be able to select your desired operating system through your UEFI boot menu (Before grub or Windows BCD) even if multiple OSes are on a single drive. Some cheaper and lazy manufacturers *COUGH* MSI,,, do not implement the boot variables into permenant memory. You might even need to rename grub the name of a Windows BCD bootloader file in order to get the motherboard to recognize it. I can't imagine any collusion between MSI and Microsoft... If I am wrong, please fill me in of a better way to boot grub on an MSI UEFI motherboard. Final thoughts: Get rid of Ubuntu and install Arch. Let people dual boot because the market isn't doing to change fast enough for it to matter. New games that matter are far and few between these days, even for Windows. We're getting stop gap measure after the next these days. Linux is going to make a difference when Microsoft and Apple feel the need to immitate Linux for doing what Linux does, not what it could do (play Windows games). Being able to customize your desktop and icons, have total control over your own machine, and stimulate new frontiers of software with a free and open platform are trains that are incompatible with consumer businesses. They don't want to give you control, but sometimes they do have something worth using for 10% of the time. I'm writing this on Arch Linux that I built (not manjato, or others) so I know what I'm talking about and I use linux more than 90% of the time. If Linux had GTA V, the Legacy Tomb Raider Series, and Skyrim I would uninstall Windows.Linux also needs to figure out the Wayland issue. Proprietary GPU drivers perform like a potato on Wayland but sticking with XWindows is like remaining on a sinking ship. NVidia drivers at least make an attempt to support Wayland but surprisingly AMD has had little Vulkan support for Wayland. The opensource community is fragmented because the companies that fund os development take the technology with them without expending minimal resources to plugging the finished product into other os projects because that would create competition. If anything, we should be more cautious about hybrid open source products. I'm not talking about products that conveniently happen to utilize existing open source. I'm talking about projects like Chromium that Google initiated to help develop the Chrome browser or the Darwin project that Apple used to create macos. We're told that the "community" works on these projects free of control but if I wanted to add a feature to Chromium that Google didn't like, it wouldn't stick. It's only open if you're giving.
I am a Linux newbie but have a lot of experience with computers in general. With that said, I have a dual boot system that works great but if you do not know what you're doing, you can wipe out your entire Windows partition if you're not careful. I have no other option but to install it on a separate partition because my laptop only supports one HD internally, or else I would have put it on another drive. There are a lot of things that can go wrong when setting up a dual boot machine and I totally agree with you on much of what you said. The first time I tried to install Linux on a dual boot, I wiped out my Windows boot partition. I installed Linux to boot from that partition instead of a separate boot/efi fat32 partition. So, it would only boot to linux. The option of booting to Windows was not in the GRUB menu. I did some research and reset the EFI partition on my Win partition. So, it doesn't matter how experienced you are with computers in general, you can still make mistakes unless you do the initial research and most people won't do that. The basic computer user doesn't understand partitioning and file systems, etc... That's where 99% of all trouble happens, during setup and partitioning. I would recommend that any linux newbie do research on their linux distro of choice and understand how the want to partition it. So, in that respect - I agree with you. But, if you know what you're doing, there is nothing wrong with dual booting. I don't recommend installing linux unless you have a solid understanding of the dual boot process. Installing Linux in a VM isn't going to help you understand the installation process. Just my 2 cents. I almost forgot, adjusting BIOS settings is almost always necessary.
Joe, what about dual booting or multi-booting different linux distros on same harddrive? All linux.........NO WINDOWS??? Thanks for any input!! Also if I install multiple linux system can I share the same /home directory??
I don't think that will work out the easy way. (sharing the same home dir). I think for that for sharing the other system would have to be online. But you could create a seperate partition where you store your files. Or maybe when you are on a desktop, you could build in an extra 'data' harddisk.
Very good and informative video. I am very happy using Linux Mint 17.2 on my laptop. Recently acquired a used Win 7 laptop and was considering dual booting with Linux. Think I will just try the Win 10 upgrade and if I don't like it will just wipe the drive and install Linux. Does that sound like a good idea?
Greetings and salutations Joe! I have to agree dual booting is very frustrating. The clock issue drove me around the corner until I found the page you shown. Dual booting also allowed me to use a Desktop PC when the Windows 7 OS was suspected to contain malware (AD ware was certain). I was able to move my documents and media over to the linux /home partition and continue working for another two months. Only using Windows boot for printing and scanning. I got a 2007-era Core 2 Duo laptop and installed Linux Mint 17.2 Xfce and after moving all the files from backup (and fixed printer issue) made it my main computer. I finally found my Windows 7 recovery disk (I put it somewhere SAFE!) so I wiped and reinstalled Windows 7 back on the Desktop PC by itself.
I’m a total committed dual booter.....listen to Joe as a dual booting can be very temperamental. If you don’t mind routinely nuking and paving(complete reinstall) you probably shouldn’t dual boot. Great well spoken argument Joe, as always an impressive video.
Thanks. I'm so glad I watched this before I tried to dual-boot my laptop. I am interested in installing Cinnamon on my laptop. Do you have a video for that?
I remember when I first started using OpenBSD. My wife insisted that I keep Windows 98 on the machine, though she was nice enough to get me the OpenBSD install media. I don't recall what bootloader I used, but I ended up making a dual-boot system. It was a crazy thing to do, especially being so new to both OpenBSD and dual-booting, but I succeeded in making the HDD dual-boot. I swore I'd never do that again. Now I have a machine where I dual-boot between Linux and Windows, but they live on separate HDDs. Actually, at the moment, it's triple-boot on separate HDDs. I also, albeit temporarily, have OpenBSD on the same machine (long story). If I had the money for the hardware I'd keep every OS housed in itself own tower and use a KVM switch to go between Windows and Linux.
Excellent advice! These days it's so easy to have separate computer hardware. It's also easy and risk-free to share keyboard/video/mouse between computers with a kvm. So I'm going to convert my main PC to Linux and transfer all Windows stuff to an unobtrusive skull canyon nuc and stick it on the side of the main PC (a large Phantek case). That, and a Triplite kvm (an excellent kvm), will give me the "duality" I need for the transition out of Windows. The added benefit is that folders on both machines will visible from each other.
Thanks Joe - your comments are much appreciated. I have little knowledge, but have had experienced dual boot issues like those you mentioned. I'll not do it again!
I just saw The Dual Boot Deception video. Been dual booting with Linux & Windows here for over 8 years, starting with an Intel Atom run Netbook that constantly failed at the time and forcing me to return it. Although, I was hooked ever since then and always tried to find better means of a more stable Linux. Speed forward to today, I want to believe that EFI and Windows 10 are stronger than ever at this kind of thing. In truth, will likely wait for Ubuntu 16.10 (yes 10) and Mint 19 to purge my Windows and go 100%. Working on a 3 year old system and have a newer Windows SSD laptop for higher efficiency. Thanks for you videos, man! been watching many hours here the last 2 weeks and while at times testing Linux distros while Joe Collins chirps in the background - LOL. Alright - take care of yourself. Bye!
Thank you Joe. I recently downloaded Windows 10 and I am constantly being plagued by popup and pop under so, I decided to give Linux a try but wanted to get some background information on it before using it.You did a great job of explaining the difficulties that awaits someone who is not ready for the technical expertise that is required to make a system dual bootable.I have an old Dell laptop that I am going to use to familiarize myself with Linux before moving from Windows. However, I must repeat, I am disappointed with Windows 10 because I thought it would at least be better at stopping popups etc. than Windows 3.1.
+Ralph Bromley Good for you. I have worked with a lot of folks with lots of different PCs and I can tell you that a dual boot is usually more unstable than if you had a single OS. I don't know why, it just is. Have a nice day! :)
+Joe Collins Joe you can't make statement like that if you want to be taken seriously. You have a "feeling" that it's more unstable but you don't know what it is ? You are scaring people for nothing. I do "feel" that running windows 10 is detrimental for my health but I don't know what it is.
+armagedon515 LOL... I can say whatever I want, thank you. Whether it's taken seriously is up to the listener. I've worked with a lot of folks and those who have dual booted report more stability issues than those who run Linux as the sole OS. Period. I'm not sure what is going on but I do know that it is true. I'm not trying to "scare" anyone, I'm simply relating what I have learned through experience. :)
+Ralph Bromley Fact of life that adding layers of complexity increases opportunity for failure. Generally, I'd venture to say that dual booting isn't inherently less stable. Just added complexity, which increases odds of failure.
+WhoSfr33z3r It is a known fact that Windows update broke ... Windows itself. It is a known fact that level 5 Tornadoes happen without warning. As I said earlier, do a backup of your stuff or use the boot-repair utility.
Joe, your 110% write and I myself have never setup dual booting because I new it was nothing but trouble and I do not have time for that kind. Over the years since way back when ReadHat 6.0, I have often switched from Windows to Linux. Back and forth possibly hundreds of times. I just was not satisfied with either one and finally drop Windows from my mind by thinking what was it that Windows could do that Linux could not do. Finally I decided that Linus was just as good and better for what I needed to do on Windows. I just had to learn a few things is all. I can't imagine why I would ever go back to Windows ever again. I have however used Windows in VirtualBox several times and I think that is a safer way than dual booting. That may be an option for many people that want to run Windows in a safe environment and far as I know with my experience with VirtualBox, have never had any problems. Yes, there are a few issues such as interfacing hardware but, for the most it works well enough for me. One thing too is that Windows for me has always ran faster in VirtualBox than if it was actually installed as my main operating system. Don't ask me why this is but, true in my experiences.
I am dual booting off of a 2014 Mac Mini into an external SSD running off a usb 3.0 port with Ubuntu Mate 16.04, which has become my daily driver. It all works perfectly. Originally I was doing the same thing, only to the internal drive, which also worked perfectly. (I just had to figure out the "nomodeset" thing). When I replaced the internal drive with an SSD, I decided to use two different drives. I use rEfind as the boot loader. rEfind is easy to bypass in Mac should I decide to do something else. I have learned a lot from you, and I thank you. Would you do a review of Ubuntu Studio, or a review of running Ubuntu Studio components on Ubuntu Mate?
I can certainly testify to the perils of dual boot. When I used to dual boot Linux and Windows, and was less savvy than I am now, I once deleted a partition used by GRUB. When I rebooted I was presented with a text prompt, not a menu and seemingly had no way to boot into either system. I ended up wiping my HD and starting over. Now I run only Linux Mint on both my laptop and desktop, the only MS product I install is the fonts.
Hey man, this really helped me.Thanks a lot.Only a question of opinion, How could you explain the experience of using linux as compared to windows especially for someone who is considering switching from windows to linux?
Never seen the point of DualBoot. I have linux on my Macbook and Windows on stationary computer. Linux is fast and it is great for office and mobile work. Great Video
I agree with your judgement. I have tried switching to Linux multiple times over the years via dual booting. I had ongoing problems with stability (for whatever reason) and getting things to work, and third parties required that I use software that only worked on Windows or go through some excruciating alternative process. I couldn't customise Linux the way I wanted, even doing what people said should work. I screwed the bootloader and had to learn how to fix it so I could even run Windows. I tried again. Eventually, I stopped using Linux after a bad experience with gaming after a build-up of frustrations at not knowing how things worked well enough to get a user experience as good as I was used to on Windows. I quit Linux again and even paid for Windows 7 to ethically be able to run it on my computer. I've been using Windows exclusively since, with few regrets. Of course I recently ran into Windows' limitations again and thought "this is ridiculous! I really need to install and learn Linux!" and guess what I found? A mishmash of partitions and boot loaders, scattered across two hard drives. I was so intimidated by the mess of partitions, not knowing whether I would lose data deleting and resizing partitions that I just said "you know what? I have things to do. I can do them on Windows." If I had just kept it separate I might have been a happy Linux user by now.
I started out dual booting in 2015, stopped a few years later and became insistent on using one OS per machine, and now I'm dual booting with UEFI and GPT on separate drives. I would personally argue GPT makes it easier than MBR, provided of course you disable secure boot on UEFI or configure it. I love how GRUB even detects the other EFI system partition on the other drive and lets me swap to that. I still agree that dual booting isn't really for novice computer users in particular but I grew up technical and loving computers so my perspective is different.
I don't do it anymore either. I used to have a two hard drive system, with GRUB on the Linux drive in my gaming PC and I'd go into the boot menu to choose. Worked but cumbersome. Now I have an Asus VM-60 mini PC for Linux and a KVM switch to go back and forth easily. I think of myself as platform agnostic, because I know what I'm doing, however, It's getting so new or casual users don't need a full, desktop style OS anymore. If all they're doing is Web based email, surfing, social media, etc. I turn them to smartphones, tablets, or Chromebooks.
Altho I love to dual boot this video makes true points about problems I recently dealt with too. Another issue: you have to disable fast boot in Windows 10, an overdue feature Microsoft finally added that helps it catch up in competition. I dealt with the clock problem as well, Windows having a different time each load. I feel like it may have been resolved with basic settings, otherwise I'll be doing some of the steps this video mentions to deal with it. Dual booting is still fun and something I recommend to friends I want to win over to Linux slowly, but there are precautions to take and risks as well, in addition to tweaks you have to make sooner than later. I dual boot Windows 10 and Linux 19 on a newer laptop.
Deception isn't the term I would use since dual boot does exactly what it says it does. It could be a deception as in a method to wean someone off Windows or as a "crutch" since many don't want to abandon their familiar Windows for an unfamiliar system. It is true that you are basically stuck with dual boot once you have set it up since removing the Windows partition after the install can create problems. I have setup dual boot on several computers without problems, but then I usually don't completely remove the Windows partition after the install. A better solution if there are programs that just don't have equivalents in Linux or won't work acceptably with Wine is to install Windows in a virtual machine. I have used VirtualBox to install Windows XP, Win 7, and Windows 10 so I can run a few programs that aren't available in Linux and don't have acceptable (to me) equivalents in Linux.
I agree Joe, I built a hackintosh, I run Mint Linux on a intel i5 processor and a laptop and quit windows altogether along with dual booting. I also own several iMacs, but Mac’s and iPhones are getting so restrictive with everything (photos primarily when backing-up) all going through iTunes, I’m seriously starting to contemplate Androids. Have you made any videos on Android phones versus iPhones? Thanks for the great videos.
one thing u forgot joe is u can load a different bootloader on another drive when u load windows and linux so when u boot u choose which harddrive that boots up u put the linux and windows bootloader on the other drive which works fine on boot up just choose which drive u r booting up too
Hello Joe, thanks for the video and explanation, I did not think you were being obtuse as I completely understand where you are coming from. I do have an image of my system (acronis) so I can re-install my system should I have too. If it was not for FSX I would go over to Linux in an heartbeat but like you said I need a separate computer to run Linux on which will be the answer to my problem, so for now I'll just keeping going with my problem until the system has a problem I can't deal with at which time I'll reformat and use the image which is on an external drive.
I was close to blowing this video off because it's not really the case that dual-booting makes a system unstable. That's too bad, because the point about the sudden learning curve of going back to just Windows, resizing partitions, etc., is a good point, particularly because it's an easy one for competent GNU+Linux users to forget.
+pxc I have worked with a lot of folks with a lot of different hardware and I have found any dual boot to be more prone to problems than if the computer is just running one OS. I don't know why but it's true and therefore I stand by my statement. :)
I've dual booted in the past, no issues, but that was in the 98 days... Now (present), I agree with you - best thing most people can do is learn about virtual machines - I still use XP but in a virtual machine, takes seconds to boot and I can get in and out in a flash - not only that, super easy to rollback a hosed system which has happened a few times due to bad updates (never had a linux problem like that :) )
You can also use a trayless hot-swap bay that's $17 on Amazon. You don't need a separate computer. You only need your OS's on separate hard drives. Then you can swap hard drives before booting the computer.
Gr8 vedio I totally agree with every word u said . I dual booted windows 10 and ubuntu and tht caused boot problems then i ended up deleting both and installing Linux Mint alone and since then i only run linux on all my machines 😉
I am new to linux so I had a little issue setting up dual boot. Driver did not allow Zorin to recognize windows7. I stripped windows down to the basic install. Threw in a second hard drive and ran the Zorin 10 ultimate CD installed next to windows. It found and installed on the blank drive and I run a dual boot now. No clock issues or anything else.
14:27 I agree, having these seemingly easy to use graphical partition editors can really mess things up. I have been partitioning hard drives since the 80 MB drive was mainstream and we had to know how to use fdisk. I have been installing Linux since the Caldera OpenLinux days.
I so agree! Years ago I had a dual boot. Windows 8 update replaced the boot loader & I never did get back into Ubuntu on that machine in spite of countless hours of Googling and trying to get Grub reinstalled. When I later got a new computer I went back to using Ubuntu.
I'm watching a lot of your vids of late. I just bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex and was considering a dual boot setup with Windows 10. After watching this I'm strongly leaning towards a full Ubuntu install. The news of the Unity abandonment got me back into Linux. I thought Unity was one of the most bold Linux moves in years. Should I consider installing Ubuntu Gnome instead? Thanks!
Maybe I have just been lucky but even as a Linux noob I was able to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Then I went one further and added Linux Mint for an OS menage a trois. I have since went back to a dual boot with just Windows 7 and Ubuntu Mate which is my favorite choice.
I like a multi boot system, I have Win7 on it's own SSD and Linux Mint on another SSD and use the Bootable Devices Menu to choose between them. I agree putting them both on the same Drive can at times create issues but on separate Drives it's a great setup. For me it's the best way to run multiple OS's.
Hi - great channel by the way - Would you have the same unease about having two or more different Linux distros on the same hard drive (and no Windows)? Until last year, I had a Windows 7 and Linux Mint harddrive until - as you mentioned in the video - a Windows update made Linux unloadable. (I got back to a Windows 7 only computer ok but I pine for Linux and am horrified by the prospect of the 'free' Windows 10 - No, thank you). But I was thinking about having something like Linux Mint as the main OS and then experimenting with specialist distros such as avlinux etc. What do you think?
As a retired electronic technician... I have dual booted many machines which I assembled most of the hardware for myself. This author's content discourages dual booting, and for the average user I agree, it is apt to be more complicated than they would want to get involved in. That much, to me is fine. However "whart's sauce for the goose is NOT sauce for the gander" i.e. diverse user needs need to be fairly respected. Another comment I have seen infers that Microsoft had modified the bios on (some) machine to prevent any other syustem from booting. Personally, I don't care who or how this has happened, but I have recently bought a Laotop which has had the same problems. When I bought this Laptop (price about $800.00 CDN, having seen the inordinate degree of difficulty to change the hard drive, I chose to have the vendor sell both the Laptop and the added SSD, and an extea USB3 external 2 1/2" drive box for the original drive.pay an added fee for them to swap the hard drive. The first technician made a few minor goofs, but those were fixed by the second one at no extra cost. However the original drive, installed in the box, with no added data written to it , would not boot the win 10 that came with it. I wanted to use Fedora 23 as a first operating system, but have the original Win 10 availabe tl boot fron the USB box. The second tech downloaded and installed Fedora on the SSD, now in the Laptop, and that works fine. However neither he, another technican from the original seller, nor I have been able to date to make this machine boot from an external device. I can live with this but I am very miffed at whoever has condoned this situation. Personally I see this as an anti-trust/competition fairness issue. However, time will tell if the issue is going to have a legally protected competition fairness solution including comprehensive fairness in price, convenience and publicly visible availability right down to bricks and mortar retail presence. country by country, time will also tell which are truly ready, willing and able to respond to this "economic intrusion". Names of commercial interests here are left out, to protect from anyone misusing any commercial reputations. The problem, IMHO is an trade fairness one and needs respect from that approach!
I dual booted Windows 7 and Ubuntu (version 11 something I think) a few years ago. I didn't experience any major problems with it, but I didn't really like it, because I found myself always wanting to be on the other system no matter which one I was using. Then a few days ago, I watched some videos about good Linux systems and decided to ditch Windows 8 for Linux Mint. There are some things I'm going to miss, but so far I don't regret the decision.
+Ankh Infinitus I dual booted from 2009 until 2012 and I found myself feeling the same way... Linux didn't really show it's magic to me until I just installed it all by itself. Good luck! :)
Joe Collins Mint really came through for me today. I had some photos to edit, which I previously did with a combination of Lightroom and GIMP. I used UFRaw instead, and it was every bit as good for what I needed.
Hi Joe! Thanks for explaining this! I was wondering how long the average learning curve is that you have seen from your experience helping people with Linux? About every 1-2 years, I've given Ubuntu a try via dual-boot, live USB, and once via virtualization. I've ran into many of the issues you mentioned that are common to beginners, and admittedly, each attempt with Ubuntu survived maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, or maybe a week. I always had school or work projects that required me to use my personal (and only) computer so would quickly jump back to Windows. I am considering a full-Ubuntu installation and sticking with it! I no longer have to worry about working from home, and have also gained much interest in Linux altogether, than just Ubuntu. I'm hoping that I will be able to stick with it long enough to know whether I prefer Linux or Windows.
Linux is a journey, not a destination. I'm learning all the time. Most folks get the basics pretty quickly but where you go from there is up to you. :)
In my personal notebook I have Linux Mint 17.3 dual booting with FreeBSD 11. Took me three days of practice in Virtual Box and two attempts to get it right - first time I screwed up the EFI configuration.
I bought win 10 i3 machine recently and it was so slow, then I installed win 7 and 8.1 in different partition! now I am planning to install Linux mint and Ubuntu in another partition. Hopefully all will be well!
He's full of it. Dual booting is as stable as single boot. GRUB2 can be setup on its own partition. It launches the OSs. Once the OSs start it makes no difference how they started.
It probably messes with the ESP and obliterate anything that isn't Windows related. I really don't like that EFI stuff, back in the day you could easily install the Linux boot loader on "/" and add Linux in Windows boot menu if for some reason you wanted to keep Windows MBR.
ForgottenUmbrella Yeah, that sounds more like a bug or error or something, since it can't even detect the other partitions on the drive and they're dabbling in Linux stuff now (Ubuntu terminal on Windows and Sphere OS) so they should be making triple sure that they don't mess something up. Oh, and let's not forget that it doesn't clear out macOS even though it can't read it's partitions either (at least as far as I know). Well, I've got a 1TB external drive (the same size as internal in my laptop) and dd on speed dial if something happens (also, pro tip for everyone, pipe dd into gzip if you've got free space and/or a backup drive that is not bigger than the main drive).
Thanks for this great explanation. So far I followed your suggestion and bought another ssd, using a caddy for my laptop. So I'm not having issues doing dual boots using the bios instead of grub. And this is helping me not to have issue (as in the past). Now I would like to build a desktop pc, but I wonder if there's a way to have a physical switch that can select the drive I want to use. Specifically I'd like to have 1ssd Windows + 1ssd Linux + 1hdd storage. I've googled it many times but I can't find anything. There's a switch by Kingwin etc.. but only works with sata and I'd like to use M.2 PCI. Thanks (great channel, subscriber)
I'm pretty sure its still not recommended, but I personally Dual Boot Linux on the Legacy BIOS since it was never used till Linux was installed. So my UEFI containing Windows 10 isn't affected because it's installed to a different BIOS. This makes un-dual booting much easier as you just need to delete the partitions and add them back to the drive you split it from. Again I'm probably being stupid, but that's what I do.
Good video, I like your stile of explaining things. I have tried linux many time in the past always go back to windows because of all the setup problem I have had. I could just never get one hundred percent usability with any install that I tried. Anyhow I plan on watching the rest of your videos to see if maybe I want to try linux yet again. Thanks
I've dual-booted various Windows from XP to 10, and various Linux distros for years across multiple systems and I've only had one issue that boils down to me resizing a partition while it was in an unstable state seeing as I forgot to disable the quick booting option in Win10.
I had to think about this regarding my experience. Several years ago I installed Linux as dual boot on my brand new laptop and never looked back. Never had any problems with dual booting Linux via GRUB that couldn't be addressed. However at some point, my original Windows 7 factory installed OS stopped taking updates and was never able to figure out why. I just kept removing previous updates and yet never was able to resolve the problem. Long story short, I ended up being forced into doing a fresh install of not Windows 7 but instead Windows 10 and it seems that Windows only installs by wiping out all partitions except maybe a Windows rescue partition if usable. Windows 7 would no longer fully install on my Lenovo laptop so clearly MS broke something. With Win 10 fully installed, Linux then had to be reinstalled. So a reinstall of Windows will wipe the drive while Linux with GRUB play nice. Later when upgrading to a SSD I tripped over another problem with some kind on limit imposed on the number of partitions allowed on the SSD. I think I had to delete the Windows rescue partition in order to get Linux installed. Anyone else run into this for dual boot?
You make the problems sound more frequent than they actually are. It might scare newbies away. Other than that it's a good video, I fully recommend 2 drives. The instability during switch from windows to Linux might be due to the devices being already initialized by windows. Powering off and powering on the machine and booting Linux fixed the problems I have encountered.
my laptop has two hard drives. Planning on backing everything up so I can have Windows and Linux separate... thanks for the info. I must have photoshop and lightroom. Loving Linux for everything else.
Great advice! I lost my windows 7 system when I first started with Linux. Thankfully I liked Linux better anyway but it was a hard lesson. I will not do it again because like you got off the windows merry go-round! .
Thanks for this video Joe! It explains a lot. My wife had XP on an older computer. It worked fine, but Mister Softy decided to end support for it so I tried to duel boot a linux distro. I down loaded to a disk then to a thumb drive. I BIOS'ed. I grubbed. I partitioned. It was a nightmare on Elm street! The end result was buying her a refurbished one with windows 7. My computer is running Vista and is getting a little long in the tooth. My next machine will be all linux. Don't know why, but I'm sold on Zorin. Maybe I'LL try to strong arm the store into installing Zorin as a condition of the new purchase. Regards Sedan
+Joe Collins I don't see it happening in the near term. I'm running a 2 Quad Processor Q6600. I don't buy many machines, because I buy ones that are really more than I need when I do buy. Regards Sedan
I am going to extend my notebook's Windows HD storage space with an SSD, inside which I want to install my future main OS, Ubuntu. I think I should divide my previous HD in 2 partitions, one to have Windows in it, and another to have my shared stuff (the big files of both systems). I Believe it's good because Windows cannot read stuff in Linux's storage format, and the opposite occurs to linux (AM I RIGHT?). Would it still be safe? What do you all think of it? Thanks for the video, Joe Collings!!!
Dual boot, they made it so easy to install but if you have to fix it it's very hard. I totally agree with that. I've been there so many times, and the idea on installing on 2 drives is excellent, but I'm on a laptop, so I've no choice. Although I want to transition from Win to Mint, gradually... Since I'm here, I'd like to ask... Mint Mate or Cinnamon? I've 8gb ram and i5 3210M 2.50ghz. Regards
I'm new to the dual-booting problem and I was wondering if you mean that all these hazards can be avoided by installing the OSs on separate hard drives or are there still some pitfalls? Thanks
I don’t see the big issue with dual boot. I have been booting Linux along with not one Windows version but several; for over 10 years, without major problems. I have a Mac where I boot Windows too. Yes, it is not simple but not rocket science either. Scaring people off will not protect them more. Fear the day when knowledge plays in a one-man band. PS: currently I multi boot win 10, win 7 and Mint. Again, I won’t say that anyone can do it, but it just takes anyone with interest in learning.
This video isn't talking about you. This video doesn't refer to users who know how dual boots work. You obviously understand how it works. Newbies don't. This video talks about dual booting for newbies who don't understand how it works. Not everyone who uses a computer knows how it works. They get into trouble because they don't understand... Need I continue? :)
But they can learn, your video makes it sound much worse than it is, anybody can learn to do it with the internet, its just not for nerds anymore. Instead of getting into something you personally don't like, make a video explaining the process instead for newbies, don't make them afraid of it.
I find the easiest method of dual booting is on Apple machines through refind. Works pretty damn well, but I have had bad luck with Debian based distros on Macs, namely ones with multi-touch trackpads.
Quick question? I run a dual boot with 2 Hard Drives, one for Windows, and one for Ubuntu, so technically I have two bootlosders. I set Grub to just set the boot to my other hard drive, then my computer restarts again and goes though the Windows boot loader. Is this stable?
I have 5 hard drives. Windows 10 on an ssd, and 2 other ssds for games. 2 other regular hard drives for storage and backups. Is it safe or "non system stability" threatening to set a partition on my storage drive and put linux on it and change the boot order in bios when I want to access the linux drive? Will grub boot loader still get installed on C: where the windows 10 currently is? or will changing the boot order and accessing the E: drive (storage) keep windows and linux plus the bootloader separate?
would it be possible to add a second hard drive to a laptop then have windows on one drive and linux on another ? is that even possible ? would it be possible to have an option to decide which hard drive to boot from with a mouse click ?
Thanks for this 'warning', I thought I might dual boot my Mac with Linux ... but now I know this is not a good idea. Or maybe I will do it for a short time to see whether I'll miss MacOS or not and after that period remove everything and single boot Linux on my Mac. The thing is that Apple made my super fast MacBook Pro sluggish with Sierra which I really hate. It's all SSD minded now and non Apple memory is NOT really supported (after a few years of usage)... So thanks again Joe
Just want to say that I have been dual booting Linux and windows for years, and I've had very few problems. I use Linux for over 95 % of the time, but for work or other specific tasks, I just need windows every once in a while.
A few notes, if you want to do it.
1 - have a long think about how much space each OS should have, running out of space sucks.
2 - Install windows first, then Linux, then the Linux installer can help you a lot, doing it the other way around is a major hassle.
3 - turn off the quick start up mode that basically hyphenates windows rather than actually close it, otherwise you can not access the files from windows in Linux, and could possibly bypass the boot menu.
4 - get a program for windows to access your Linux files.
That being said, if you don't actually need windows, get rid of it, but if you do, in my opinion it is not that hard to make it work.
I've had Windows and 2 or three different Linux distros multi-booting without problems, back when I was still young and dumb and hadn't committed to a favourite distro. Nowadays if I want to experiment with a distro - it's a VM.
Never had a problem I couldn't track back to overenthusiasm and underthinking.
Having said the above - I would do it again, BUT I WOULD NEVER, EVER UNDERTAKE TO SUPPORT SOMEONE REMOTELY WHO HAD DONE IT.
I have..like you Simon, had a dual boot system with windows 7 and Linux Mint for at least 4 years without ONE single problem...I have to have windows to run my SDR play radio, since Linux does not have and will not have the software to do that...I would have thought by now...(I really dont know how long) that alot more company's would start using Linux than they do...and that, Im sure is the only reason alot of people dual boot.
@Simon AIs Nielsen.. ''4 - get a program for windows to access your Linux files.'' .what exactly would that program be? googlin' around haven't ran across one that would some how make Win7 'see' the Ubuntu on another drive...
I have sold dual boot systems and have never had an issue. Sometimes Linux takes over my booting software but then you just choose which one you want to boot through Grub. Grub is less elegant than the Windows dual booting program I use. In additon, no way to sell an elegant presentation through UEFI. BTW, I use Linux Mint 90 percent of the time on my triple boot system, all Linux distros. I have a Windows 8.1 system as well dual booted with Zorin.
At the end of the day, one must decide what level of risk they're willing to face. weigh the risks vs. reward.You make a serious and important point sir. Thanks for the critical effort to educate.
I just moved from Windows 10 to Linux Mint last night -- thanks for your videos, I am learning a lot.
*****
If it works for you... but you better knock on wood, don't jinx it.
The only reason I keep my dual-boot is for gaming. Gaming on Linux isn't a feasible option. Everything else, I do on my good old Ubuntu Gnome.
Unless you have a GPU that has a shitty Linux driver, or Wine not supporting your game or other software very well. There's plenty of reasons to keep Windows up. For me, it's music production and sometimes gaming, but for other things, Ubuntu. I'm probably on Windows 10% of the time.
ch3atcode
Valve has started pushing gaming on Linux with their Debian based SteamOS and a fair bit of my steam library is available on my Linux machine
The Vulcan graphics api is also generating some competition for Microsoft's DirectX api and is set to replace OpenGL in the gaming world
Other game launchers like Origin don't seem to have embraced Linux so far though
I have been dual booting for the past 5+ years on my laptop. I have updated Windows 7 to 10 and updated Xubuntu twice now up to 14.10 never had any problems. Maybe I've just been lucky!
i've never had a problem either
Just wanted to say that I think your videos are absolutely informative and I love how to talk to people you don't talk at them. I'm definitely looking forward to more of your work and you've definitely got another subscriber.
i fully agree Joe i am also dual booting windows and Linux but both ar on seperate ssd/hdd so there is never a conflict
You make good points in this video. I'd love to have seperate computers for Windows and Linux, but that'll have to wait a while yet.
I've been looking into dual-booting and this video, and especially the comment section, have been sources of invaluable information, and have shown me what I need to search for to get it done right.
Thanks everyone!
Excellent explanation, Joe. I worked in service documentation of UNIX systems for 15 years, and your video could be the basis of a course in supportability:
1) The problem of giving new users a choice (whether to dual boot), without letting them know about the dangers down the line.
2) The difference between normal users (the 99%), and those of us who thrive on technical details. We technical people have to get out of our shells and realize that what works for us often does not work for most other people.
3) The inherent instability and risk of trying to get two disparate systems (Windows and Linux) to work together, when each of the systems will be undergoing major updates. This configuration is an automatic red flag for systems designers.
4) As you say several times in the comments - if you want to dual-boot, go for it, as long as you understand the risks and take precautions.
In my experience, the best way to dual boot is to use multiple hard drives.
It is great that there are people like Joe Collins out there.
As a long time Linux user, I come across a lot of computer users complaining about this and that with their windows installation.
When you tell them there are other OS options they can use, they look at you like you have two heads or are from another planet.
My most recent was a neighbor that came to me with 199 different computer problems.
Of course all were windows related. After a long, long talk, I gave him a DVD with a LIVE version of the latest Ubuntu to try out. After I held his hand , showed him how to install the DVD and run Ubuntu, he had the opportunity to try it and it did everything he wanted and needed to do. His main concern was that he wanted to be able to run future windows based programs and will Linux do it??? Of course he went to Best Buy and was told they did not recommend he erased windows from his machine.
Kinda makes sense, they charge him an arm and two legs every time he brings them his computer to fix software related issues.
Needless to say, this neighbor is still using windows today.
I dual boot, its stable enough but has its issues, I hope that I can find alternatives to all of the programs that I need on Windows so I can go to Linux full time
Hooray! Finally some great information on the perils of dual booting. Thanks!!
i have 3 hdd of 500GB/ea and I have installed
1. windows 7
2. ubuntu
3. kali linux
4. phoenix os
and I haven't had any problem jumping from one os to another.
I love your videos man, keep it up
What a great video! You've managed to articulate the issues that have bugged me for many years (been in 'IT' since the mid 70s (Apple II, PET, Trash80 etc.)) and have never seen a good, long-term (emphasis on Long-Term) implementation of dual-boot systems. Absolutely agree the best way forward is with physically separate drives, or a "caddy' system, plug-in drive bay.
For anyone thinking about it, Linux distros have come a very long way since the 'complicated terminal' days, and have matured amazingly. If you're looking for a free alternative to 'commercial' (your hardware belongs to us) OS, have a look, you'll be very pleasantly surprised (and hard drives really aren't that expensive now) :)
Great vids. Thank you.
+Looney Dude Thanks! :)
Exceptionally well explained as always, in human terms. Nice work!
Great videos, yeah i used to do the dual boot thing all the time when i did penetration testing. Your totally right, its never stayed stable. Switiching back and forth is so bad over time, your SO right about that. I stopped doing it. Thanks, keep up the great work.
I tried dual booting years ago, when I was first learning about linux. Now I have seperate systems and don't dual boot. I have my Mac and I have the PC i purposed as the media server that runs linux. I've had rock solid results doing it this way, and in fact, I forget the server is running sometimes because it just sits there. I know it's on because the power button lights up. Anyway think some great solid points were made in this video.
I enjoy using multiple operating systems on different hardware configurations. I find you gain more knowledge that way instead of sticking to a single platform.
My 6 year old HP Pavillion laptop that I bought a year ago with Mint 17.1 on it up and died on me recently So I picked up a refurbished HP Elitebook 8460p that came with Windows 10 on it that I could wipe and replace with Mint 17.3 Cinnamon. But then I got thinking that maybe I should do a dual boot instead. About that time I am learning about Microsoft's apparently adopting a North Korea like heavy handed form of customer disregard, manipulation and blatant disrespect of privacy (We want to know all about you because we know what's best for you) . Then I came across your excellent Dual Boot Deception and...well ...that settled it. It was, with a great deal of satisfaction, that I placed a DBan disk in my optical drive and wiped clean any remaining relationship I had with Windows replacing it with Linux Mint 17.3 . Thank you, Joe, not only for Dual Boot Deception but also for your other informative and very helpful videos as well.
Dual-booting is a pain in the ass, I grew to REALLY hate it after a while. Virtual machines and spare computers are your best friend.
+lmull3 Not if you already invested a huge amount of money in building your PC. You still need to run Windows natively for gaming to utilize its power.
+HarryUnchained That's assuming you only have one computer.
+lmull3 For most people money is limited and I for one wouldn't want to use a have to use a shitty cheap computer for most of my computing needs, just so that I can use my powerful system for Windows exclusively.
And I do have two computers - one is an old laptop and I'd rather not use it for anything while at home if I can avoid it, since it is painfully slow.
+lmull3 no EFI systems use reFind MBR systems use windows bootloader!
Well Linux doesn't need full access to all your hardware. My VM for Linux Mint is a dual core 4 gb of ram system and runs plenty fast with little to no hanging up. I'm only using Linux for secure web browsing and playing around to further expose myself to the system. Most everything else is just done through Windows which is the host OS.
Wow. I never thought of just installing Linux onto another drive and boot it through the boot menu. That is definitely the best way!!
Very good points but I haven't ran into any problem with DB. For many years, I have never seen a windows update rewrite the boot loader unless of course, you switch windows OS ( that said, I don't know what happen if you upgrade your windows OS with a Linux system present, to windows 10 ). Neither a Linux update, even a kernel update, damage Windows. For gamer, until the "big" games are ported to it, dual boot is a must. Getting another computer just to run Linux as your main computer or another hard drive and installing it, is not a financial option for the first, or a technical option for the second, for a lot of people. It is way simpler to DB. Sorry but it is not the "demon" as you presented. They don't interfere with each other once booted. I do have an ntfs partition which can share data between them. As for the "clock" thing, I think it's finally resolved with the latest Linux distros. I don't have to change clock anymore.
P.S not that I want to be mean, but for a technical person like yourself, getting virus every month on windows is a bit far fetch.
+armagedon515 You missed the point of the video, I'm afraid. You are a technical person, most new users are not. I was talking about new users who don't understand how this all works. As I said at the beginning, you can do with your PC whatever you want. I just don't support dual boot for novice users. :)
+armagedon515 hi there, dual booter here with ubuntu 14.04 and win10... which I wish I could downgrade at this point. but that's besides the point. just here to share that I upgraded from win8.1 to 10 on the same disk as my ubuntu install and that I had no problems with my own particular upgrade. so it can be done
+Ohmyginger - Yeah, it works most of the time but sometimes it doesn't and when it doesn't it's a pain to fix. As long as your aware of that fact and are ready to deal with it then it's fine.
Thanks JC. I myself, have two separate hard drives - one with Win7 and the other with Linux both booting independently through bios. I have my bios setup to automatically boot Linux first (boot order #1). If I need to go to windows which I unfortunately need to on occasion because of work related stuff, I hit F2 during the boot process and change the order of the boot drives so that the windows drive boots first. I know there's probably a more efficient method of doing it through grub or something but I go to that Win7 drive so infrequently it doesn't matter AND it just works for me and I like it. Hopefully, one day I will be able to turn my Win7 drive into "storage" as you have you done ;) Cheers!
The way I do dual-boot: I keep the Windows boot-loader on the MBR and GRUB on the Linux partition so they don't interfere with each-other. And I modify the Windows boot-loader to recognize Linux through EasyBCD. Works gr8.
But I had many failures until I learned the safe way to do it. So knowledge is power.
Though I agree with you that things can get very confusing and go very wrong pretty quickly but the biggest benefit for most people is being able to have the best of both worlds. I've install Linux as dual boot on many machines for many people and the only problem I've ran into was when all 4 primary partitions were used by the manufacture. That was a neat little trick I thought. Another problem I had was when a person I installed dual boot for decided he didn't want it on his machine anymore. What it all boils down to is anything we decide to do in life isn't always easy. For me the knowledge I get from trial and error is priceless. I still have Windows on one machine just so I could boot it up once a year to do my taxes. Also Ive stuck it out with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. For me it's the only distro I've ever liked. Great video BTW :-)
Really great video. I asked a friend who introduced Linux to me if I would be able to see and use my external hard drives with Linux and he said no, I should do a dual boot instead. And while I understood about 80% of what you said, I can see how it could easily be confusing to someone like me who isn't a 'techy' person. I planned to make my PC a linux and keep my laptop Windows just in case... as long as I can see my external HDDs as they have my movies on it. So I haven't made the switch yet.
I've been dual booting for years now. The first time I tried it, it became a nightmare. However, I've learned some solutions and my pc's are just as stable as any other system
Tips:
Install Windows first. Windows will sometimes write the BCD (Windows bootloader) on multiple drives in a BIOS environment. If you are reinstalling windows, just be ready to reinstall GRUB if needed.
Howto Reinstall GRUB:
1) boot into a linux install cd/usb
2) mount linux root partition to /mnt
3) mount boot linux partition to /mnt/boot
4) chroot or arch-chroot (Arch linux) to /mnt
4) grub-install or whatever you need to do to reinstall grub...
Get Windows as a grub boot option:
Install os-prober package
re-run grub-mkconfig
Also /etc/default/grub has more grub options
Learn grub command line:
The command list in grub is short. You can usually type 'c' or something similar to get into the shell. Then type 'h' for help
UEFI:
Some newer machines prefer EFI. These machines have multiple schemes to operate. More quality Lenovo's allow windows and Linux to install boot variables into the motherboard firmware. These are great as they avoid the issue of Windows overwriting grub with bcd. You should be able to select your desired operating system through your UEFI boot menu (Before grub or Windows BCD) even if multiple OSes are on a single drive. Some cheaper and lazy manufacturers *COUGH* MSI,,, do not implement the boot variables into permenant memory. You might even need to rename grub the name of a Windows BCD bootloader file in order to get the motherboard to recognize it. I can't imagine any collusion between MSI and Microsoft... If I am wrong, please fill me in of a better way to boot grub on an MSI UEFI motherboard.
Final thoughts:
Get rid of Ubuntu and install Arch. Let people dual boot because the market isn't doing to change fast enough for it to matter. New games that matter are far and few between these days, even for Windows. We're getting stop gap measure after the next these days. Linux is going to make a difference when Microsoft and Apple feel the need to immitate Linux for doing what Linux does, not what it could do (play Windows games). Being able to customize your desktop and icons, have total control over your own machine, and stimulate new frontiers of software with a free and open platform are trains that are incompatible with consumer businesses. They don't want to give you control, but sometimes they do have something worth using for 10% of the time. I'm writing this on Arch Linux that I built (not manjato, or others) so I know what I'm talking about and I use linux more than 90% of the time. If Linux had GTA V, the Legacy Tomb Raider Series, and Skyrim I would uninstall Windows.Linux also needs to figure out the Wayland issue. Proprietary GPU drivers perform like a potato on Wayland but sticking with XWindows is like remaining on a sinking ship. NVidia drivers at least make an attempt to support Wayland but surprisingly AMD has had little Vulkan support for Wayland. The opensource community is fragmented because the companies that fund os development take the technology with them without expending minimal resources to plugging the finished product into other os projects because that would create competition. If anything, we should be more cautious about hybrid open source products. I'm not talking about products that conveniently happen to utilize existing open source. I'm talking about projects like Chromium that Google initiated to help develop the Chrome browser or the Darwin project that Apple used to create macos. We're told that the "community" works on these projects free of control but if I wanted to add a feature to Chromium that Google didn't like, it wouldn't stick. It's only open if you're giving.
I am a Linux newbie but have a lot of experience with computers in general. With that said, I have a dual boot system that works great but if you do not know what you're doing, you can wipe out your entire Windows partition if you're not careful. I have no other option but to install it on a separate partition because my laptop only supports one HD internally, or else I would have put it on another drive. There are a lot of things that can go wrong when setting up a dual boot machine and I totally agree with you on much of what you said. The first time I tried to install Linux on a dual boot, I wiped out my Windows boot partition. I installed Linux to boot from that partition instead of a separate boot/efi fat32 partition. So, it would only boot to linux. The option of booting to Windows was not in the GRUB menu. I did some research and reset the EFI partition on my Win partition. So, it doesn't matter how experienced you are with computers in general, you can still make mistakes unless you do the initial research and most people won't do that. The basic computer user doesn't understand partitioning and file systems, etc... That's where 99% of all trouble happens, during setup and partitioning. I would recommend that any linux newbie do research on their linux distro of choice and understand how the want to partition it. So, in that respect - I agree with you. But, if you know what you're doing, there is nothing wrong with dual booting. I don't recommend installing linux unless you have a solid understanding of the dual boot process. Installing Linux in a VM isn't going to help you understand the installation process. Just my 2 cents. I almost forgot, adjusting BIOS settings is almost always necessary.
Joe, what about dual booting or multi-booting different linux distros on same harddrive? All linux.........NO WINDOWS???
Thanks for any input!!
Also if I install multiple linux system can I share the same /home directory??
I don't think that will work out the easy way. (sharing the same home dir). I think for that for sharing the other system would have to be online. But you could create a seperate partition where you store your files. Or maybe when you are on a desktop, you could build in an extra 'data' harddisk.
Very good and informative video. I am very happy using Linux Mint 17.2 on my laptop. Recently acquired a used Win 7 laptop and was considering dual booting with Linux. Think I will just try the Win 10 upgrade and if I don't like it will just wipe the drive and install Linux. Does that sound like a good idea?
Greetings and salutations Joe! I have to agree dual booting is very frustrating. The clock issue drove me around the corner until I found the page you shown.
Dual booting also allowed me to use a Desktop PC when the Windows 7 OS was suspected to contain malware (AD ware was certain).
I was able to move my documents and media over to the linux /home partition and continue working for another two months. Only using Windows boot for printing and scanning.
I got a 2007-era Core 2 Duo laptop and installed Linux Mint 17.2 Xfce and after moving all the files from backup (and fixed printer issue) made it my main computer.
I finally found my Windows 7 recovery disk (I put it somewhere SAFE!) so I wiped and reinstalled Windows 7 back on the Desktop PC by itself.
I’m a total committed dual booter.....listen to Joe as a dual booting can be very temperamental. If you don’t mind routinely nuking and paving(complete reinstall) you probably shouldn’t dual boot. Great well spoken argument Joe, as always an impressive video.
I've dual booted since the 486 days. Never had an issue.
I dualbooted my brother's laptop so now its a Windows 7/Ubuntu laptop,works perfectly.
Thanks. I'm so glad I watched this before I tried to dual-boot my laptop. I am interested in installing Cinnamon on my laptop. Do you have a video for that?
Haha I remember doing the cable swap thing.
Definitely had some of the dual booting problems mentioned.
I remember when I first started using OpenBSD. My wife insisted that I keep Windows 98 on the machine, though she was nice enough to get me the OpenBSD install media. I don't recall what bootloader I used, but I ended up making a dual-boot system. It was a crazy thing to do, especially being so new to both OpenBSD and dual-booting, but I succeeded in making the HDD dual-boot. I swore I'd never do that again.
Now I have a machine where I dual-boot between Linux and Windows, but they live on separate HDDs. Actually, at the moment, it's triple-boot on separate HDDs. I also, albeit temporarily, have OpenBSD on the same machine (long story). If I had the money for the hardware I'd keep every OS housed in itself own tower and use a KVM switch to go between Windows and Linux.
Excellent advice! These days it's so easy to have separate computer hardware. It's also easy and risk-free to share keyboard/video/mouse between computers with a kvm. So I'm going to convert my main PC to Linux and transfer all Windows stuff to an unobtrusive skull canyon nuc and stick it on the side of the main PC (a large Phantek case). That, and a Triplite kvm (an excellent kvm), will give me the "duality" I need for the transition out of Windows. The added benefit is that folders on both machines will visible from each other.
Thanks Joe - your comments are much appreciated. I have little knowledge, but have had experienced dual boot issues like those you mentioned. I'll not do it again!
I just saw The Dual Boot Deception video. Been dual booting with Linux & Windows here for over 8 years, starting with an Intel Atom run Netbook that constantly failed at the time and forcing me to return it. Although, I was hooked ever since then and always tried to find better means of a more stable Linux.
Speed forward to today, I want to believe that EFI and Windows 10 are stronger than ever at this kind of thing. In truth, will likely wait for Ubuntu 16.10 (yes 10) and Mint 19 to purge my Windows and go 100%. Working on a 3 year old system and have a newer Windows SSD laptop for higher efficiency.
Thanks for you videos, man! been watching many hours here the last 2 weeks and while at times testing Linux distros while Joe Collins chirps in the background - LOL.
Alright - take care of yourself. Bye!
Thank you Joe. I recently downloaded Windows 10 and I am constantly being plagued by popup and pop under so, I decided to give Linux a try but wanted to get some background information on it before using it.You did a great job of explaining the difficulties that awaits someone who is not ready for the technical expertise that is required to make a system dual bootable.I have an old Dell laptop that I am going to use to familiarize myself with Linux before moving from Windows. However, I must repeat, I am disappointed with Windows 10 because I thought it would at least be better at stopping popups etc. than Windows 3.1.
+David Blake Best way to go... :)
Dualbooting causing instability?
Sounds like bullshit, I have been dual booting for years never had any issue
+Ralph Bromley Good for you. I have worked with a lot of folks with lots of different PCs and I can tell you that a dual boot is usually more unstable than if you had a single OS. I don't know why, it just is. Have a nice day! :)
+Joe Collins Joe you can't make statement like that if you want to be taken seriously. You have a "feeling" that it's more unstable but you don't know what it is ? You are scaring people for nothing. I do "feel" that running windows 10 is detrimental for my health but I don't know what it is.
+armagedon515 LOL... I can say whatever I want, thank you. Whether it's taken seriously is up to the listener. I've worked with a lot of folks and those who have dual booted report more stability issues than those who run Linux as the sole OS. Period. I'm not sure what is going on but I do know that it is true. I'm not trying to "scare" anyone, I'm simply relating what I have learned through experience. :)
+Ralph Bromley Fact of life that adding layers of complexity increases opportunity for failure. Generally, I'd venture to say that dual booting isn't inherently less stable. Just added complexity, which increases odds of failure.
+WhoSfr33z3r It is a known fact that Windows update broke ... Windows itself. It is a known fact that level 5 Tornadoes happen without warning. As I said earlier, do a backup of your stuff or use the boot-repair utility.
Joe, your 110% write and I myself have never setup dual booting because I new it was nothing but trouble and I do not have time for that kind. Over the years since way back when ReadHat 6.0, I have often switched from Windows to Linux. Back and forth possibly hundreds of times. I just was not satisfied with either one and finally drop Windows from my mind by thinking what was it that Windows could do that Linux could not do. Finally I decided that Linus was just as good and better for what I needed to do on Windows. I just had to learn a few things is all. I can't imagine why I would ever go back to Windows ever again. I have however used Windows in VirtualBox several times and I think that is a safer way than dual booting. That may be an option for many people that want to run Windows in a safe environment and far as I know with my experience with VirtualBox, have never had any problems. Yes, there are a few issues such as interfacing hardware but, for the most it works well enough for me. One thing too is that Windows for me has always ran faster in VirtualBox than if it was actually installed as my main operating system. Don't ask me why this is but, true in my experiences.
+TheGordy1950 I guess I need to learn how to spell the word right instead of write........... Sorry Joe.
I am dual booting off of a 2014 Mac Mini into an external SSD running off a usb 3.0 port with Ubuntu Mate 16.04, which has become my daily driver. It all works perfectly. Originally I was doing the same thing, only to the internal drive, which also worked perfectly. (I just had to figure out the "nomodeset" thing). When I replaced the internal drive with an SSD, I decided to use two different drives. I use rEfind as the boot loader. rEfind is easy to bypass in Mac should I decide to do something else. I have learned a lot from you, and I thank you. Would you do a review of Ubuntu Studio, or a review of running Ubuntu Studio components on Ubuntu Mate?
I can certainly testify to the perils of dual boot.
When I used to dual boot Linux and Windows, and was less savvy than I am now, I once deleted a partition used by GRUB. When I rebooted I was presented with a text prompt, not a menu and seemingly had no way to boot into either system.
I ended up wiping my HD and starting over.
Now I run only Linux Mint on both my laptop and desktop, the only MS product I install is the fonts.
Deleting partitions used by something is always problematic, dual boot or not.
the nail on the head as usual good stuff
Hey man, this really helped me.Thanks a lot.Only a question of opinion, How could you explain the experience of using linux as compared to windows especially for someone who is considering switching from windows to linux?
Never seen the point of DualBoot. I have linux on my Macbook and Windows on stationary computer. Linux is fast and it is great for office and mobile work. Great Video
I agree with your judgement. I have tried switching to Linux multiple times over the years via dual booting. I had ongoing problems with stability (for whatever reason) and getting things to work, and third parties required that I use software that only worked on Windows or go through some excruciating alternative process. I couldn't customise Linux the way I wanted, even doing what people said should work. I screwed the bootloader and had to learn how to fix it so I could even run Windows. I tried again. Eventually, I stopped using Linux after a bad experience with gaming after a build-up of frustrations at not knowing how things worked well enough to get a user experience as good as I was used to on Windows. I quit Linux again and even paid for Windows 7 to ethically be able to run it on my computer. I've been using Windows exclusively since, with few regrets. Of course I recently ran into Windows' limitations again and thought "this is ridiculous! I really need to install and learn Linux!" and guess what I found? A mishmash of partitions and boot loaders, scattered across two hard drives. I was so intimidated by the mess of partitions, not knowing whether I would lose data deleting and resizing partitions that I just said "you know what? I have things to do. I can do them on Windows." If I had just kept it separate I might have been a happy Linux user by now.
I started out dual booting in 2015, stopped a few years later and became insistent on using one OS per machine, and now I'm dual booting with UEFI and GPT on separate drives. I would personally argue GPT makes it easier than MBR, provided of course you disable secure boot on UEFI or configure it. I love how GRUB even detects the other EFI system partition on the other drive and lets me swap to that. I still agree that dual booting isn't really for novice computer users in particular but I grew up technical and loving computers so my perspective is different.
I don't do it anymore either. I used to have a two hard drive system, with GRUB on the Linux drive in my gaming PC and I'd go into the boot menu to choose. Worked but cumbersome. Now I have an Asus VM-60 mini PC for Linux and a KVM switch to go back and forth easily. I think of myself as platform agnostic, because I know what I'm doing, however, It's getting so new or casual users don't need a full, desktop style OS anymore. If all they're doing is Web based email, surfing, social media, etc. I turn them to smartphones, tablets, or Chromebooks.
Altho I love to dual boot this video makes true points about problems I recently dealt with too. Another issue: you have to disable fast boot in Windows 10, an overdue feature Microsoft finally added that helps it catch up in competition. I dealt with the clock problem as well, Windows having a different time each load. I feel like it may have been resolved with basic settings, otherwise I'll be doing some of the steps this video mentions to deal with it. Dual booting is still fun and something I recommend to friends I want to win over to Linux slowly, but there are precautions to take and risks as well, in addition to tweaks you have to make sooner than later. I dual boot Windows 10 and Linux 19 on a newer laptop.
Deception isn't the term I would use since dual boot does exactly what it says it does. It could be a deception as in a method to wean someone off Windows or as a "crutch" since many don't want to abandon their familiar Windows for an unfamiliar system.
It is true that you are basically stuck with dual boot once you have set it up since removing the Windows partition after the install can create problems. I have setup dual boot on several computers without problems, but then I usually don't completely remove the Windows partition after the install.
A better solution if there are programs that just don't have equivalents in Linux or won't work acceptably with Wine is to install Windows in a virtual machine. I have used VirtualBox to install Windows XP, Win 7, and Windows 10 so I can run a few programs that aren't available in Linux and don't have acceptable (to me) equivalents in Linux.
I agree Joe, I built a hackintosh, I run Mint Linux on a intel i5 processor and a laptop and quit windows altogether along with dual booting. I also own several iMacs, but Mac’s and iPhones are getting so restrictive with everything (photos primarily when backing-up) all going through iTunes, I’m seriously starting to contemplate Androids. Have you made any videos on Android phones versus iPhones? Thanks for the great videos.
one thing u forgot joe is u can load a different bootloader on another drive when u load windows and linux so when u boot u choose which harddrive that boots up u put the linux and windows bootloader on the other drive which works fine on boot up just choose which drive u r booting up too
Hello Joe, thanks for the video and explanation, I did not think you were being obtuse as I completely understand where you are coming from. I do have an image of my system (acronis) so I can re-install my system should I have too. If it was not for FSX I would go over to Linux in an heartbeat but like you said I need a separate computer to run Linux on which will be the answer to my problem, so for now I'll just keeping going with my problem until the system has a problem I can't deal with at which time I'll reformat and use the image which is on an external drive.
+:Clive-Albert :Dodd No problem. I needed to go through this and your comment gave me the inspiration. :)
Joe Collins
Sometimes I appear to have a use...
I was close to blowing this video off because it's not really the case that dual-booting makes a system unstable.
That's too bad, because the point about the sudden learning curve of going back to just Windows, resizing partitions, etc., is a good point, particularly because it's an easy one for competent GNU+Linux users to forget.
+pxc I have worked with a lot of folks with a lot of different hardware and I have found any dual boot to be more prone to problems than if the computer is just running one OS. I don't know why but it's true and therefore I stand by my statement. :)
I've dual booted in the past, no issues, but that was in the 98 days... Now (present), I agree with you - best thing most people can do is learn about virtual machines - I still use XP but in a virtual machine, takes seconds to boot and I can get in and out in a flash - not only that, super easy to rollback a hosed system which has happened a few times due to bad updates (never had a linux problem like that :) )
+dixielandfarm I wouldn't put two OS's on the same Hard drive these days at all. You're right. Why do that when you can run a VM? :)
+Free Thinker Better to game natively no matter what OS. :)
You can also use a trayless hot-swap bay that's $17 on Amazon. You don't need a separate computer. You only need your OS's on separate hard drives. Then you can swap hard drives before booting the computer.
Gr8 vedio I totally agree with every word u said . I dual booted windows 10 and ubuntu and tht caused boot problems then i ended up deleting both and installing Linux Mint alone and since then i only run linux on all my machines 😉
I am new to linux so I had a little issue setting up dual boot. Driver did not allow Zorin to recognize windows7. I stripped windows down to the basic install. Threw in a second hard drive and ran the Zorin 10 ultimate CD installed next to windows. It found and installed on the blank drive and I run a dual boot now. No clock issues or anything else.
14:27 I agree, having these seemingly easy to use graphical partition editors can really mess things up. I have been partitioning hard drives since the 80 MB drive was mainstream and we had to know how to use fdisk. I have been installing Linux since the Caldera OpenLinux days.
I so agree! Years ago I had a dual boot. Windows 8 update replaced the boot loader & I never did get back into Ubuntu on that machine in spite of countless hours of Googling and trying to get Grub reinstalled. When I later got a new computer I went back to using Ubuntu.
I'm watching a lot of your vids of late. I just bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex and was considering a dual boot setup with Windows 10. After watching this I'm strongly leaning towards a full Ubuntu install. The news of the Unity abandonment got me back into Linux. I thought Unity was one of the most bold Linux moves in years.
Should I consider installing Ubuntu Gnome instead? Thanks!
Maybe I have just been lucky but even as a Linux noob I was able to dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Then I went one further and added Linux Mint for an OS menage a trois. I have since went back to a dual boot with just Windows 7 and Ubuntu Mate which is my favorite choice.
I like a multi boot system, I have Win7 on it's own SSD and Linux Mint on another SSD and use the Bootable Devices Menu to choose between them. I agree putting them both on the same Drive can at times create issues but on separate Drives it's a great setup. For me it's the best way to run multiple OS's.
+mail2ted What you just said would be complete gibberish to a new user. That's the point of the video. :)
Hi - great channel by the way - Would you have the same unease about having two or more different Linux distros on the same hard drive (and no Windows)? Until last year, I had a Windows 7 and Linux Mint harddrive until - as you mentioned in the video - a Windows update made Linux unloadable. (I got back to a Windows 7 only computer ok but I pine for Linux and am horrified by the prospect of the 'free' Windows 10 - No, thank you). But I was thinking about having something like Linux Mint as the main OS and then experimenting with specialist distros such as avlinux etc. What do you think?
+Christopher X You can boot whatever you want if you're comfortable with doing so. This video is about dual booting for new users. :)
As a retired electronic technician...
I have dual booted many machines which I assembled most of the hardware for myself.
This author's content discourages dual booting, and for the average user I agree, it is apt to be more complicated than they would want to get involved in.
That much, to me is fine. However "whart's sauce for the goose is NOT sauce for the gander" i.e. diverse user needs need to be fairly respected.
Another comment I have seen infers that Microsoft had modified the bios on (some) machine to prevent any other syustem from booting.
Personally, I don't care who or how this has happened, but I have recently bought a Laotop which has had the same problems.
When I bought this Laptop (price about $800.00 CDN, having seen the inordinate degree of difficulty to change the hard drive, I chose to have the vendor sell both the Laptop and the added SSD, and an extea USB3 external 2 1/2" drive box for the original drive.pay an added fee for them to swap the hard drive.
The first technician made a few minor goofs, but those were fixed by the second one at no extra cost.
However the original drive, installed in the box, with no added data written to it , would not boot the win 10 that came with it.
I wanted to use Fedora 23 as a first operating system, but have the original Win 10 availabe tl boot fron the USB box.
The second tech downloaded and installed Fedora on the SSD, now in the Laptop, and that works fine. However neither he, another technican from the original seller, nor I have been able to date to make this machine boot from an external device.
I can live with this but I am very miffed at whoever has condoned this situation.
Personally I see this as an anti-trust/competition fairness issue.
However, time will tell if the issue is going to have a legally protected competition fairness solution including comprehensive fairness in price, convenience and publicly visible availability right down to bricks and mortar retail presence.
country by country, time will also tell which are truly ready, willing and able to respond to this "economic intrusion".
Names of commercial interests here are left out, to protect from anyone misusing any commercial reputations. The problem, IMHO is an trade fairness one and needs respect from that approach!
I dual booted Windows 7 and Ubuntu (version 11 something I think) a few years ago. I didn't experience any major problems with it, but I didn't really like it, because I found myself always wanting to be on the other system no matter which one I was using. Then a few days ago, I watched some videos about good Linux systems and decided to ditch Windows 8 for Linux Mint. There are some things I'm going to miss, but so far I don't regret the decision.
+Ankh Infinitus I dual booted from 2009 until 2012 and I found myself feeling the same way... Linux didn't really show it's magic to me until I just installed it all by itself. Good luck! :)
Joe Collins
Mint really came through for me today. I had some photos to edit, which I previously did with a combination of Lightroom and GIMP. I used UFRaw instead, and it was every bit as good for what I needed.
Thank-you Joe. Excellent advice. :-)
Hi Joe! Thanks for explaining this! I was wondering how long the average learning curve is that you have seen from your experience helping people with Linux? About every 1-2 years, I've given Ubuntu a try via dual-boot, live USB, and once via virtualization. I've ran into many of the issues you mentioned that are common to beginners, and admittedly, each attempt with Ubuntu survived maybe 15 minutes, an hour, a day, or maybe a week. I always had school or work projects that required me to use my personal (and only) computer so would quickly jump back to Windows. I am considering a full-Ubuntu installation and sticking with it! I no longer have to worry about working from home, and have also gained much interest in Linux altogether, than just Ubuntu. I'm hoping that I will be able to stick with it long enough to know whether I prefer Linux or Windows.
Linux is a journey, not a destination. I'm learning all the time. Most folks get the basics pretty quickly but where you go from there is up to you. :)
In my personal notebook I have Linux Mint 17.3 dual booting with FreeBSD 11. Took me three days of practice in Virtual Box and two attempts to get it right - first time I screwed up the EFI configuration.
So glad I watched, I got an old dusty dual core laptop, going to install Ubuntu on that first, Thanks.
I bought win 10 i3 machine recently and it was so slow, then I installed win 7 and 8.1 in different partition! now I am planning to install Linux mint and Ubuntu in another partition. Hopefully all will be well!
He's full of it. Dual booting is as stable as single boot. GRUB2 can be setup on its own partition. It launches the OSs. Once the OSs start it makes no difference how they started.
Not for nwe users who don't know what's going on. Also, Windows 10 regularly blows out Linux... This video is more pertinent than ever.
To clarify, you are saying Windows 10 on one drive messes with a bootloader ON ANOTHER DRIVE?
It probably messes with the ESP and obliterate anything that isn't Windows related. I really don't like that EFI stuff, back in the day you could easily install the Linux boot loader on "/" and add Linux in Windows boot menu if for some reason you wanted to keep Windows MBR.
ForgottenUmbrella Yeah, that sounds more like a bug or error or something, since it can't even detect the other partitions on the drive and they're dabbling in Linux stuff now (Ubuntu terminal on Windows and Sphere OS) so they should be making triple sure that they don't mess something up. Oh, and let's not forget that it doesn't clear out macOS even though it can't read it's partitions either (at least as far as I know). Well, I've got a 1TB external drive (the same size as internal in my laptop) and dd on speed dial if something happens (also, pro tip for everyone, pipe dd into gzip if you've got free space and/or a backup drive that is not bigger than the main drive).
I had the same issue.
Thanks for this great explanation. So far I followed your suggestion and bought another ssd, using a caddy for my laptop. So I'm not having issues doing dual boots using the bios instead of grub. And this is helping me not to have issue (as in the past). Now I would like to build a desktop pc, but I wonder if there's a way to have a physical switch that can select the drive I want to use. Specifically I'd like to have 1ssd Windows + 1ssd Linux + 1hdd storage. I've googled it many times but I can't find anything. There's a switch by Kingwin etc.. but only works with sata and I'd like to use M.2 PCI. Thanks (great channel, subscriber)
The calculation that Joe mentions is called the ntpdrift file or the offset.
I'm doing the duel boot with 2 hard drives, it still uses grub as the boot loader, works fine
I'm pretty sure its still not recommended, but I personally Dual Boot Linux on the Legacy BIOS since it was never used till Linux was installed. So my UEFI containing Windows 10 isn't affected because it's installed to a different BIOS. This makes un-dual booting much easier as you just need to delete the partitions and add them back to the drive you split it from.
Again I'm probably being stupid, but that's what I do.
Good video, I like your stile of explaining things. I have tried linux many time in the past always go back to windows because of all the setup problem I have had. I could just never get one hundred percent usability with any install that I tried. Anyhow I plan on watching the rest of your videos to see if maybe I want to try linux yet again. Thanks
What about dual booting Linux with Linux? I am assuming that is not an issue. I love Debian, but would love to try out a few non-Debian distros.
I've dual-booted various Windows from XP to 10, and various Linux distros for years across multiple systems and I've only had one issue that boils down to me resizing a partition while it was in an unstable state seeing as I forgot to disable the quick booting option in Win10.
Somewhere in my house I have a dual boot Gateway 2000 with Win 3.11 and Slackware 1.xxx, I think the boot loader was LILO.
I had to think about this regarding my experience. Several years ago I installed Linux as dual boot on my brand new laptop and never looked back. Never had any problems with dual booting Linux via GRUB that couldn't be addressed. However at some point, my original Windows 7 factory installed OS stopped taking updates and was never able to figure out why. I just kept removing previous updates and yet never was able to resolve the problem. Long story short, I ended up being forced into doing a fresh install of not Windows 7 but instead Windows 10 and it seems that Windows only installs by wiping out all partitions except maybe a Windows rescue partition if usable. Windows 7 would no longer fully install on my Lenovo laptop so clearly MS broke something. With Win 10 fully installed, Linux then had to be reinstalled. So a reinstall of Windows will wipe the drive while Linux with GRUB play nice. Later when upgrading to a SSD I tripped over another problem with some kind on limit imposed on the number of partitions allowed on the SSD. I think I had to delete the Windows rescue partition in order to get Linux installed. Anyone else run into this for dual boot?
The reason why I switch out the hard drives, having hot-swappable hard drives is the best thing to do honestly in this situation.
Gaming computer cases work the best. I would highly recommend *Thermaltake Level 10 GTS* It has 4 hot-swaps
The main reason why you need separate hard drives with different *operating systems* on there, so you can actually hot-swap them.
You make the problems sound more frequent than they actually are. It might scare newbies away. Other than that it's a good video, I fully recommend 2 drives. The instability during switch from windows to Linux might be due to the devices being already initialized by windows. Powering off and powering on the machine and booting Linux fixed the problems I have encountered.
my laptop has two hard drives. Planning on backing everything up so I can have Windows and Linux separate... thanks for the info. I must have photoshop and lightroom. Loving Linux for everything else.
I'm interested in making a smart phone Linux. There doesn't really seem many options out there do you know anything you could share?
Great advice! I lost my windows 7 system when I first started with Linux. Thankfully I liked Linux better anyway but it was a hard lesson. I will not do it again because like you got off the windows merry go-round! .
AN EYE OPENER !! THANK YOU !!
Thanks for this video Joe!
It explains a lot. My wife had XP on an older computer. It worked fine, but Mister Softy decided to end support for it so I tried to duel boot a linux distro.
I down loaded to a disk then to a thumb drive. I BIOS'ed. I grubbed. I partitioned. It was a nightmare on Elm street!
The end result was buying her a refurbished one with windows 7.
My computer is running Vista and is getting a little long in the tooth. My next machine will be all linux.
Don't know why, but I'm sold on Zorin. Maybe I'LL try to strong arm the store into installing Zorin as a condition of the new purchase.
Regards
Sedan
+Sedan Smith Please let me know if they do it for you. I'm betting they won't. It's hard to find anyone who will do that. :)
+Joe Collins
I don't see it happening in the near term. I'm running a 2 Quad Processor Q6600.
I don't buy many machines, because I buy ones that are really more than I need when I do buy.
Regards
Sedan
I am going to extend my notebook's Windows HD storage space with an SSD, inside which I want to install my future main OS, Ubuntu. I think I should divide my previous HD in 2 partitions, one to have Windows in it, and another to have my shared stuff (the big files of both systems). I Believe it's good because Windows cannot read stuff in Linux's storage format, and the opposite occurs to linux (AM I RIGHT?). Would it still be safe? What do you all think of it?
Thanks for the video, Joe Collings!!!
Dual boot, they made it so easy to install but if you have to fix it it's very hard. I totally agree with that. I've been there so many times, and the idea on installing on 2 drives is excellent, but I'm on a laptop, so I've no choice. Although I want to transition from Win to Mint, gradually... Since I'm here, I'd like to ask... Mint Mate or Cinnamon? I've 8gb ram and i5 3210M 2.50ghz. Regards
I'm new to the dual-booting problem and I was wondering if you mean that all these hazards can be avoided by installing the OSs on separate hard drives or are there still some pitfalls?
Thanks
I don’t see the big issue with dual boot. I have been booting Linux along with not one Windows version but several; for over 10 years, without major problems. I have a Mac where I boot Windows too.
Yes, it is not simple but not rocket science either.
Scaring people off will not protect them more. Fear the day when knowledge plays in a one-man band.
PS: currently I multi boot win 10, win 7 and Mint. Again, I won’t say that anyone can do it, but it just takes anyone with interest in learning.
This video isn't talking about you. This video doesn't refer to users who know how dual boots work. You obviously understand how it works. Newbies don't. This video talks about dual booting for newbies who don't understand how it works. Not everyone who uses a computer knows how it works. They get into trouble because they don't understand... Need I continue? :)
But they can learn, your video makes it sound much worse than it is, anybody can learn to do it with the internet, its just not for nerds anymore. Instead of getting into something you personally don't like, make a video explaining the process instead for newbies, don't make them afraid of it.
I find the easiest method of dual booting is on Apple machines through refind. Works pretty damn well, but I have had bad luck with Debian based distros on Macs, namely ones with multi-touch trackpads.
Quick question? I run a dual boot with 2 Hard Drives, one for Windows, and one for Ubuntu, so technically I have two bootlosders. I set Grub to just set the boot to my other hard drive, then my computer restarts again and goes though the Windows boot loader. Is this stable?
Nevermind, I didn’t watch the whole video before I commented
That's still the safest way to do it... :)
I'm probably going to get rid of windows cause I bought crossover. My school is ms-sponsored so I have to use office one drive, etc
I have 5 hard drives. Windows 10 on an ssd, and 2 other ssds for games. 2 other regular hard drives for storage and backups. Is it safe or "non system stability" threatening to set a partition on my storage drive and put linux on it and change the boot order in bios when I want to access the linux drive? Will grub boot loader still get installed on C: where the windows 10 currently is? or will changing the boot order and accessing the E: drive (storage) keep windows and linux plus the bootloader separate?
would it be possible to add a second hard drive to a laptop then have windows on one drive and linux on another ? is that even possible ? would it be possible to have an option to decide which hard drive to boot from with a mouse click ?
Thanks for this 'warning', I thought I might dual boot my Mac with Linux ... but now I know this is not a good idea. Or maybe I will do it for a short time to see whether I'll miss MacOS or not and after that period remove everything and single boot Linux on my Mac. The thing is that Apple made my super fast MacBook Pro sluggish with Sierra which I really hate. It's all SSD minded now and non Apple memory is NOT really supported (after a few years of usage)... So thanks again Joe