Dual Boot Linux/Windows question

uncle_rufus · 15 Feb 2013 at 15:50

Hey all,

I'm due to get a new machine soon and whilst I'd love to forget windows completely I play a few too many games for it to be a viable option (but someday let's hope!)... So this brings us onto dual-booting, but I'm not 100% sure what will be possible on this setup, I'm going to have:

A 256Gb SSD for boot + common applications
2 500Gb Drives for general storage

My large storage is on a seperate server machine so I don't really need any huge drives at this stage. So onto my questions:

1. Would setting up a dual boot (for simplicities sake let's say Windows 7 and Ubuntu's latest LTS) on the SSD be a case of partitioning it beforehand with gparted or similar and then installing the two OS? I must confess I've not dabbled in dual boot machines before so I'm not sure what's possible.

2. Assuming I can do the above, what would my options then be if either OS needs to be replaced or upgraded? (i.e. from Win7 to Win8, or replacing Ubuntu with a different distro). How much distruption would this cause to the other partition etc. etc.?

3. Now that Steam has a linux client is there any concievable way of allowing games which work under both linux or windows to share a "steamapps" subfolder? I know steam can install to any drive/partition now which must help, so for example if I split the SSD into 3 partitions could I put one OS on each and then install what is normally the "....../steamapps/common/teamfortress2" or whatever it is? Alternatively would this be possible if the folder was on one of the mechanical drives?

My hope with the above is that I can have dual-boot both on the SSD (meaning I can hopefully switch from Windows to Linux super quickly) but at the same time I don't need to worry about which OS I've got loaded if I want to play a game that works under Linux as well.

So what do you guys think? Is it achievable?

richthomuk · 15 Feb 2013 at 16:24

Yeah just partition your SSD, then install Windows and then Ubuntu, Mint or which ever Distro you want. Upgrading shouldn't cause any problems to the other partitions, sometimes you can lose the GRUB after installing Windows on a machine that has Linux on it already but it's easy to get back.

uncle_rufus · 15 Feb 2013 at 16:34

And GRUB is the name for the screen that comes up asking you which OS you want to boot into right? (Just checking!)

Now that I think more about the Steam part of the questions above I'm wondering if it's pretty unlikely that the Linux and Windows versions of the games use the same files...

richthomuk · 15 Feb 2013 at 16:52

uncle_rufus said:
And GRUB is the name for the screen that comes up asking you which OS you want to boot into right? (Just checking!)

Now that I think more about the Steam part of the questions above I'm wondering if it's pretty unlikely that the Linux and Windows versions of the games use the same files...

Yeah, that's it. No I very much doubt they would but I'm not too sure how or if they interact with each other.

uncle_rufus · 17 Feb 2013 at 09:26

I've been reading around on the process for setting this up, can anyone let me know if this sounds right (from experience)?

1. Use a live-boot or similar to get into gparted and create my 3 partitions
2. Install Linux onto one of the partitions
3. Reboot and boot from the windows installer, putting it onto a 2nd partition

Has anyone got any suggestions for how much space I should leave for each OS? I'm unsure whether it would be best to keep the 2 OS partitions as small as possible (just enough for the core OS files) and then keep all program files and things on the 3rd partition, as otherwise it could be tricky since on the Windows side I've no idea how much space I might need for non-Linux games etc... I guess also by having things on the 3rd partition it might be easier to play about with WINE if I want to test it with a few games.

Also for the most common question asked in this section - what distro should I go with? I'm not a complete novice - I've been using Red-Hat (corporate branch of Fedora) at work for many years, but this is limited to *using* the system rather than having to administrate it (so I've zero experience using whatever package manager etc Fedora uses). My server is running the no-GUI version of Ubuntu 11.10 which I've found to be reasonably straightforward (but I've not used the GUI of course!), and Ubuntu is the *official* supported Steam distro, but I'm slightly put off to hear that the latest LTS is quite streamlined. Having googled around a bit and read other threads on here I'm wondering about Mint - has anyone got Steam working nicely on it? To me it looks like Mint is sort of similar to Ubuntu but with the (less "user-friendly") wealth of detailed options retained - is that correct?

Final question!!! (For now)... Allowing for the possibility that I might mess this up a few times am I putting my new SSD at risk in anyway? It's also the first SSD I've had so if it would be better I could do a trial install first on one of my older mechanical drives until I'm happy with the process... worth it or not?

Zaphrod · 18 Feb 2013 at 15:52

This is the proper order.

1. Boot from Gparted Magic live CD or equivalent to partition SSD Disk into 2 partitions, one NTFS for windows and one un-formatted for Ubuntu. Format the other 2 Data Drives to NTFS as Ubuntu can access them fine.

2. Install windows to the NTFS partition on the SSD. Don't bother setting up all the drivers or installing programs until you have Ubuntu installed in case something goes wrong you will have wasted your time.

3 Install Ubuntu to the Empty partition letting it format it itself. Ubuntu will detect windows and automatically add it to the Grub Boot Loader.

As for space Windows uses a lot more than Ubuntu so I would suggest 2/3 to Windows and 1/3 to Ubuntu though you could probably go 3/4 Windows and 1/4 Ubuntu.

If you have a UEFI BIOS when you boot from the CDs and press f12(or whetever ) for the one time boot options you should see 2 entries for your CD-Rom drive, make sure in all instances you choose the one that doesn't mention UEFI or you will run into issues with Windows installing to a GPT Partition rather than an MBR partition which is what you want. If windows installs to a GPT partition then Ubuntu wont be able to see that partition during the install as FDISK doesn't yet understand GPT and won't add Windows to the boot loader.

Essexraptor · 20 Feb 2013 at 19:52

Before you go any further I strongly suggest that you re-research the Steam thing. Steam games for PC (Windows) and Steam games for Linux are 2 different animals.

uncle_rufus · 21 Feb 2013 at 09:42

Essexraptor said:
Before you go any further I strongly suggest that you re-research the Steam thing. Steam games for PC (Windows) and Steam games for Linux are 2 different animals

Good advice, I have been reading up on this as much as possible (especially since the Steam configuration will be a bit later on in the setup process for this). Valve's official wiki seems to suggest that titles on Linux need to be installed onto an ext3/ext4 partition due to permissions. I'm not sure if there would be a way to sym-link some of the files across to an NTFS partition which Windows is sharing, but once I get to that point I might try downloading the smallest multi-platform game I can and messing about with it.

Zaphrod said:
If you have a UEFI BIOS when you boot from the CDs and press f12(or whetever ) for the one time boot options you should see 2 entries for your CD-Rom drive, make sure in all instances you choose the one that doesn't mention UEFI or you will run into issues with Windows installing to a GPT Partition rather than an MBR partition which is what you want. If windows installs to a GPT partition then Ubuntu wont be able to see that partition during the install as FDISK doesn't yet understand GPT and won't add Windows to the boot loader.

Sadly I didn't see this post before I ran into these issues, but I'm happy to report that a couple of installs and changes later I'm now happily booting into both Windows 7 and Mint 14 with the disk kept as GPT. I'm not 100% sure that what I've done is right, so if anyone wants to correct me please do, but partly for my own benefit to remember what I did here are the details (apologies for any botched terminology - I'm new to this!):

1. You're right that there are 2 options when installing Windows 7 from a UEFI system, in my board (Gigabyte-D3H) if I press F12 while booting to get to the boot menu (or set the boot order within the UEFI bios)... You can boot from the DVD-drive, or the same option with "UEFI:" before it.

2. Installing to the "UEFI:" option does indeed cause windows to create a GPT partition table, whereas the other option sticks to the normal MBR version. However, for me if I used the MBR option then when I eventually get into the Mint 14 installer it isn't able to recognise the partitions in the drive at all (just shows all as empty space, leaving me no option but to wipe out Windows).

3. So I DID select the "UEFI:" option, creating the 4 (!?) partitions which go along with a Windows 7 GPT install (evidently GPT also removes the 4 partition restriction of the MBR format). Then I enter the disk management within windows and shrink the main partition to create some space for Linux (in my case I think I gave it 30Gb)

4. This appears to be the crucial step... Creating my bootable Mint 14 USB pendrive I chose to boot from it at the boot menu. However this results in a similar situation to (2) above - Mint cannot work out what is going on and shows a blank drive. However returning to the boot menu shows there is also a "UEFI:" option for the USB device, (on my board I had "Corsair voyager blah blah" as the non UEFI and "UEFI: USB USB drive" as the UEFI option)

5. Using the "UEFI:" option to boot the Mint installer allowed it to see all the existing partitions and install itself and it's swap partition to the empty partition I had created, so far so good.

6. At this stage however the bootloader was slightly messed up, from the F12 boot menu I could select "Windows Bootloader" which would boot straight into Windows 7 (or presumably the Windows boot menu if it was set to appear), or "linuxmint" which would fire up GRUB2 showing only 2 entries for Mint 14 and its recovery mode.

7. To fix this I booted into Mint, then located the partition which contains the Windows bootloader. Then I added it to "/etc/grub.d/40_custom" with a suitable name using the "chainloader" command. I can post the exact details of this step if anyone needs them (don't have them to hand right now). This adds the Windows boot manager to the GRUB2 list (so it will launch Windows 7 or it's recovery menu if it has been triggered).

8. Finally I just made sure that the "linuxmint" option was ahead of the "Windows Bootloader" option in the UEFI bios.

I think this means I've still got the benefits (if there are any) of using the newer GPT system, and I've preserved Windows 7's repair features should I ever need them (without needing to worry about screwing up the MBR or anything like that).

So what do you guys think? It certainly seems to be working, but I'm holding off on installing stuff until I'm sure. (Also looking into using Clonezilla to image the whole drive once I've done the basic setup but before installing programs).