Friday, September 4, 2015

Dual booting Windows 10 and Linux

The new problem being that Windows 10 is no longer using NTFS partitions!!

When you install Windows after Linux, Windows ignores Linux, doesn’t know how to resize its partitions, and overwrites the Linux boot loader with its own. You’ll have to repair the Linux system’s boot loader before you can boot back into your Linux system again. The Ubuntu wiki has instructions for repairing your boot loader, if you need to. You can always just reinstall Linux, too. But it’s best just to install Linux after Windows.

For example, Ubuntu’s installer offers an “Install Ubuntu alongside Windows” option that will handle this for you. You will have to choose how much space to reserve for your Linux system. Typically, you’ll be resizing your Windows partition to make room for Linux, and any room you allocate to Linux will be taken away from Windows. It’s up to you how much space you want for Windows and Linux—if you’re just using Linux to fiddle around, you may not need a massive amount of space. If you plan on installing a lot of Steam games or otherwise using it as your main system, you may want a lot more space.

At this point, Linux installers should be fairly mature and capable of resizing Windows NTFS partitions without breaking anything. But it’s essential to always have backups of your important files in case anything bad happens. Of course, the Linux installer will only be able to resize your Windows partition to make room if the Windows partition has a decent amount of free space on it. If you have a PC with multiple hard drives, you could also just leave Windows installed on one hard drive and install Linux on another separate hard drive. But they’re perfectly capable of living alongside each other on separate partitions on the same hard drive.

From:   http://www.pcworld.com/article/2955460/operating-systems/dual-booting-linux-with-windows-what-you-need-to-know.html

More on UEFI/GPT:  https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/Dn898510%28v=VS.85%29.aspx

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