How safe is duel-booting with modern windows if each os has its own drive? [Solved]

[Green_Penguin]

Hi, would love to transition to Linux completely on my personal devices. Currently in a testing phase to see if I can be efficient enough personally if I "get good" with Orca and Talon. My current test machine is quite old, and I'd love to give MX a little more juice. My main laptop has an extra nvme slot, and a 500 gig nvme drive is certainly within my budget, but I can't afford to cause system stability issues. Is duel-booting with modern windows still asking for trouble even with separate drives? Thoughts?

[j2mcgreg]

One of our members @FullScale4Me has created a guide on dual booting MX and Windows that can be found here:
https://fullscale4me.com/Dual-Boot-MX-L ... -Guide.pdf

It's well worth the read.

[Green_Penguin]

One of our members @FullScale4Me has created a guide on dual booting MX and Windows that can be found here:
https://fullscale4me.com/Dual-Boot-MX-L ... -Guide.pdf

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. If I go the dual drive route, I'll definitely follow all the steps and make sure I do it right. If I follow all of those steps, how big is the stability gap between a proper config with two drives, and two separate machines?

[j2mcgreg]

Here's my perspective. I keep a separate Windows 11 machine now, separated from all my MX machines. I do this because I found Microsoft's tendency to issue updates that seriously mess with dual boot setups outweighs (in my mind) the convenience that dual boots offer, I decided that dual boots of MX and Windows just weren't worth the potential aggravation. I'm sure that others here will have different opinions.

[DukeComposed]

If I follow all of those steps, how big is the stability gap between a proper config with two drives, and two separate machines?

How big is the stability gap between having two kids share the same bedroom versus giving each child their own bedroom?

The answer is it depends on the kids. An operating system is a complex thing and the normal expectation is that it should effectively be able to manage both your hardware and itself. That makes an OS something that will take charge if you let it.

Linux in general is pretty good about playing well with other operating systems, but if you ask a Linux install to update its bootloader... it's gonna update its bootloader. You let it do that.

That could potentially shut you out of the other OSes on the machine. It's been known to happen, especially when users have multiple Linux distros and they always use, say, MX to handle their GRUB boot menu, and then one day on a lark they decide to update Linux Mint and Mint overwrites what MX did with GRUB.

Windows operating systems as a rule do not acknowledge the existence of other OSes on the same machine, so any Windows update can potentially shut you out of your Linux install. It goes likes this: "I'm Windows. I have an update. The update involves my BCD boot software. Therefore, I will update my BCD boot software to make sure I can boot again." And there goes your GRUB menu.

If you dual boot, you need to be prepared to fix the bootloader, at any time, for any reason. That's the price you pay for having multiple OSes, regardless of the fact one is from a company that has been taken to court by the United States Department of Justice over federal antitrust violations.

As a side note, dual-booting doesn't require multiple drives. Plenty of folks run 2, 3, or more OSes on a single hard disk drive, and that includes a bunch of folks who travel and use laptops with a small form factor where multiple disks would be cumbersome or infeasible. Dual booting, or multi-booting, whatever you want to call it, doesn't really affect the stability of the OS, with a few exceptions regarding drivers. Windows on a dual-boot PC is still Windows. Linux on a dual-boot PC is still Linux. You just have to be aware of the consequences of your decision to run two conflicting OSes interchangeably, and be prepared to handle situations when they may disagree with one another.

Edit: typo

[CharlesV]

+1 @DukeComposed Very well said!

An interesting side note about Windows .. it cannot always even handle *it's own* bootloader! For YEARS I have built machines that had RAID0 on twin ssd's, then put a hard drive in for an internal backup. Sometime early 2022 MS changed their update methodology and those machines started bricking... because windows would attempt to write the boot record to the first *drive* and would ignore the RAID volume, loosing "windows" in the process. SO a hands on was required to reconnect the dang proper boot sequence.

Most of these machines ran fine after that... for another year or two and then same thing happened again.

[jj 5117]

As stated above: Mostly because Windows is an intrusive PIA, there will always be the potential for complications. MS generally tries to reach-out and touch everything it can find. So, it depends on exactly what level of ease and/or security that you want. There are tons of options available and tons of different expectations among users.

Dual booting IS definitely safe enough but some occasional jacking with the boot system might be needed.
External SSDs to house either OS are also an option.

MX won't screw with your MS volumes if you don't tell it to, but MS may (most probably) try to screw with your MX volumes.
There are different ways to handle that.

The forum brought the app rEFInd to my attention about a week ago. It's found in the MX Package Installer / Enabled Repos. It's a very good boot-handling program. -- I have not wrapped my head around boot processes (or much of anything else), but I DO run multi-boot machines without much problem.

Happy Operating. Use care.

[MXRobo]

My psychic says your hyphenated Freudian slip reveals that you subconsciously knew it wouldn't work, that or your auto-suggestion worked, and the replies were mostly - no.

Gates, still thumbing his nose at the results of the Antitrust decision.

Can Windows still hack things if a separate ESP is used for each OS?
I see fehlix suggesting this quite often.

Cheers!

[CharlesV]

If you steer with the bios, and have different ESP on each drive, with that ESP ONLY pointing to the os on the drive... then it works very well. However, you have to switch it in the bios as far as I have seen. (or F10 / whatever key stroke to choose which to load )

[Green_Penguin]

+1 @DukeComposed Very well said!

An interesting side note about Windows .. it cannot always even handle *it's own* bootloader! For YEARS I have built machines that had RAID0 on twin ssd's, then put a hard drive in for an internal backup. Sometime early 2022 MS changed their update methodology and those machines started bricking... because windows would attempt to write the boot record to the first *drive* and would ignore the RAID volume, loosing "windows" in the process. SO a hands on was required to reconnect the dang proper boot sequence.

Most of these machines ran fine after that... for another year or two and then same thing happened again.

If that's true, having both systems on the same machine even with separate drives probably isn't the best fit for me. That said, the typo is definitely more Talon than Freud. Recently hopped back into windows after about a week of admittedly light personal computer usage, strictly on MX. I did not enjoy checking for updates in six different places, before I was sure every thing was up to date on windows. LOL

That said, if I get frustrated enough, it might be safe enough, if I were willing to make weekly iso snapshots of the mx side and Rescuezilla clones of the windows side. That way if it bricks, I can have a full restore in two steps.