dual boot installation

[FullScale4Me]

Early on I found the need for an outline to help the newbies and to ground others so minor sub-topics were not skipped to cause future discussions here.

Thanks for compiling and maintaining this guide. It's helped a bunch of people since you've published it and serves as a nice counterpoint to the official MX user manual.

I am wondering, however, if it wouldn't be useful to skip future discussions here by including shorter, simpler instructions for some of the minor subtopics. As in, "Run 'manage-bde -off C:' into an admin command prompt." This is an unambiguous statement and users don't necessarily even need to understand BitLocker syntax in order to copy and paste it.

In the end, disabling BitLocker and Fast Boot create discussions here that often skew towards the "how do I do that?" side rather than the more esoteric questions about startup sequences and bootloaders that you'd typically consider to be a discussion. A short and sweet "just run this" command in the guide may cut down on the confusion.

Thank you very much for that sage advice! I did collapse the SATA controller issue (has to be in 'AHCI mode') a lot. It all boils down to what works/stops working in Windows 10 and 11. In the latter, MicroSoft's 'Control Panel reconstruction' has been an ongoing work that borks the where to go 'to get 'er done' continually in 2023-24.

I realize some newbies do get frazzled when they see 33 pages. I've added a bit in the beginning of it warning that the length is attributed to coverage of edge cases (>9 pages). Perhaps I need to also call out that it's (profusely at times) illustrated?

Dual Boot is easy to setup using the short/concise guides found on the Internet.....until it's not! FullScale4Me, December 17, 2024.

It’s likely 1/3 or more of this guide is not used by most people. A lot of time in editing it has been adding fine detail for edge cases for one lesser brand or possibly one difficult model.

The flip side is the security paranoid types never click the link - OMG a PDF file! They just balloon the Q&A here to 3 or more pages in their 'help me' threads.

I'll do more of the collapse (& cutting) when I add the second outline for dual disk drive dual boot. It needs some clarity as dual hard drive is the 'preferred' advice offered in the forums of Ubuntu based distros.

‘Dual Boot: MX Linux & Windows-Installation Guide‘ updated December 19, 2024

[operadude]

@FullScale4Me

[DukeComposed]

I did collapse the SATA controller issue (has to be in 'AHCI mode') a lot. It all boils down to what works/stops working in Windows 10 and 11. In the latter, MicroSoft's 'Control Panel reconstruction' has been an ongoing work that borks the where to go 'to get 'er done' continually in 2023-24.

Writing technical documentation is a double-edged sword and it always will be. For every user who complains "Gee, this guide looks nice, but it's just a bunch of commands... it doesn't explain what to do or whyyyyy" you'll have another user come along and complain "Welp,there's a lot of steps here explaining what to do... but nothing here tells me how to do it or what to type".

Both of these categories of users are obtuse and each will fail to gain enlightenment in his own unique way. You can't win 'em all.

In the case of this thread, OP seemed wildly unprepared for the responsibilities of resizing a Windows system partition and disabling BitLocker, two things that might not be difficult for an experienced Windows user, but which are downright incomprehensible when you are fundamentally unclear on some core computing concepts. The guide did not help him.

This is the burden of being an author. Writing something like "Just run manage-bde -off" may help more people, but there's a good chance a lot of readers won't understand what they're doing, or why. And you'll get complaints about it. Or, if you spend time explaining what BitLocker is, why it's used, and why it needs to be turned off in order to boot something else, there's a good chance a lot of readers won't pay attention to a word of it and feel like they've gotten lost. And you'll get complaints about it. You can't win 'em all.

When I am king, the dual-booting instructions will read: "How to dual-boot: Install Windows. Make enough unallocated space on your disk for a Linux install. Create a new partition from the unallocated space and install Linux into the new partition. Install a bootloader that can boot Windows and Linux. If any of these steps are unclear to you, you are not ready to dual-boot." I am a lenient but uncompromising king.

The trick to implementing a good set of instructions, which I will again say you've already done, is providing clarity without merely providing rote commands to run. It's a guide meant to be read and understood, not a dual-booting script. You really can't prevent people from trying to punch above their weight. You can only try to help them realize they're in the wrong fight before they get hurt.

[operadude]

@DukeComposed

Just checked-out your tag-line:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Awesome Stuff

Thanks for your tireless efforts

[FullScale4Me]

First off thank you to @fehlix @j2mcgreg @DukeComposed @operadude for the feedback given.

I just finished a long edit session on my Dual Boot: MX Linux & Windows-Installation Guide after last night's quick edit (fehlix's suggestions) was uploaded to my website.

I cut down on the depth of the whys when it felt like it was or was heading to being a techie history lesson. I thinned out greatly the Fast Startup (aka hibernation) and BitLocker sections per suggestion from DukeComposed ... The rest were lightened a bit. A few sections were moved to the end as they were supplemental sub-topics that were not prerequisite in nature. The page count dropped from 31 to 21 pages. My retesting of the sub-items showed once again Microsoft had made some changes. The good part of it was the how-to differences between Windows 10/11 had dissolved; more unneeded text zapped. operadude thanks for cheering me on over time, yes, I did notice.

‘Dual Boot: MX Linux & Windows-Installation Guide‘ PDF 1.00 Mb updated 8 PM EST (GMT -5) December 19, 2024