Hi everyone, I am wanting to gradually make the switch from windows to Linux on my daily use desktop. I figured the best way would be to dual boot them. I have a spare drive in my desktop that I cleaned for Linux so I can have it on a separate drive from windows. Here the process I went through which ended up being unsuccessful. Removed windows drive, installed mint on seperate SSD, install was successful, installed steam and tried some games, shut down PC, put windows drive back in PC, PC wouldn’t boot to windows drive but was still booting to mint, went into BIOS and selected boot over ride to windows drive, still wouldn’t boot, created windows recovery USB, tried to fix boot in recovery mode, recovery media wasn’t able to fix boot, booted into mint, mounted windows drive and removed all the documents I needed to external drive, nuked windows and Linux drives and did a fresh install of windows.

Afterward, I googled how to do this properly. And the posts I found detailed basically the same process I did. I would like to try again but I don’t know what I did wrong and don’t want to have to go through that again.

Thanks.

PS. I have an extensive library in steam already. There’s several games that I have hours into and have friends that I play with, which is why I want to keep windows for the time being while I figure out how Linux gaming works.

EDIT: thanks for all the comments. It appears my problem was when I removed my windows drive from my PC when installing mint. I will try again and keep both drives in my PC. Thanks!

EDIT 2: UPDATE: I have successfully dual booted windows 10 and linux mint. After thinking about my problem for a while, i remembered an important detail. When I first built my PC, I had windows installed on a 120gb Kingston ssd. I then later purchased an M.2 and installed windows on there. That Kingston ssd is what i wiped and put linux on, so i’m thinking maybe the bootloader stayed on the kingston drive?? i’m not exactly sure, but after watching this video, I was confident that my original plan would work this time since i did a clean wipe of both drives and did a fresh install of windows on the M.2. I am now able to boot into windows 10 and Mint from the bios with no issues. Thanks everyone for your help.

SOLVED TLDR: you can dual boot windows and linux on 2 separate drives, and it is perfectly safe (and recommended in the video i linked) to remove the windows drive from the PC, while installing linux on another drive.

  • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Windows doesn’t play nice with Linux that means you always install Linux last as Linux does play nice with windows.

    • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      When windows updates it can totally break grub as it tries to flush out anything other than windows by default.

    • Stiltonfondu@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      If you use separate disks there shouldn’t be any issues.

      Out of morbid curiosity I just installed Windows 11 on a spare ssd alongside my main Fedora install. All I had to do was re-add the Fedora disk to first in the boot order and rebuild the grub config with os-prober enabled to add the windows install to grub

      No issues apart from Windows 11 being horrible

      • lordnikon@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        yeah that works totally it’s more the windows installer doesn’t respect the Linux install so if you don’t know how to do that how to do that with grub your screwed