Test - dual boot of Windows 10 Home & Linux Mint Mate 18.2 can be very easy

Forums › Linux › Test - dual boot of Windows 10 Home & Linux Mint Mate 18.2 can be very easy

amiga500

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#220125 27-Jul-2017 11:18

I have a spare hard drive in the PC so thought to try a dual boot setup using Windows 10 Home and Linux Mint Mate 18.2 (believe it or not I had managed to download this iso while using McDonalds free wifi!!)

Anyway, I have an Asus H81M-Plus motherboard circa 2013 with the Asus UEFI Bios EZ Mode. This is what I did. I ran the Windows 10 setup & deleted all partitions & ran the setup & got some updates, all very easy and this took around an hour or so from when I started. I noticed there was a new March 2017 driver for the HD Graphics. Nice!

Then I put in the DVD with Linux Mint Mate 18.2 and entered the UEFI Bios by pressing the Delete key repeatedly as the PC booted up. On the boot screen there was the option to boot from the DVD, so I did this.

After booting up I chose to run the setup & picked the option to install alongside Windows 10. I was choosing all the default options & got to a screen showing how much of the disk would be used by Windows 10 and how much by Mint. I think you can drag a slider to adjust this but I was happy so did not change anything here. Pretty much 50% by each O.S. I clicked next and the installation ran like any other Linux installation - quick and easy. Please note I did not have to set up any partitions, swap spaces, mount points or any of that stuff! I got to the end of the install & was prompted to reboot and was greeted with a grub screen with Mint at the top and Windows 10 the final option. It all worked perfectly. I have tried rebooting several times to Windows and Mint and zero issues. BTW every setting on this UEFI BIOS is at default I've never changed a thing.

Most of the articles that can be found on-line & magazines go into a lot of detail about mount points and swap etc & make it sound scary and complicated. While this may be necessary for some situations it can be very easy if you are lucky enough to have the right motherboard/laptop. I found one article on-line which makes exactly this point.

I have also tried installing Ubuntu 16.04 onto a Seagate 1 tb portable drive using a USB 3 port, and this runs *very* sweetly too.

ubergeeknz

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Vocus

#1832117 27-Jul-2017 11:25

Why dual boot when you can run linux in a VM, or in WSL?

jlittle

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#1832126 27-Jul-2017 11:36

I have a spare hard drive in the PC ... picked the option to install alongside Windows 10. I was choosing all the default options...

That sounds like you didn't use the spare drive...

It's much easier to install a mainstream linux distro than windows 10 these days, because it's far faster. Even on a new computer it can take hours to finish all the updates and reboots and installs of non-crippled versions of software. And you can hit the appalling (IMO) situation where your computer unavoidably decides to do an update that takes several hours.

Regards, John Little

amiga500

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#1832132 27-Jul-2017 11:46

I've only ever tinkered with VM & this is a pretty low powered machine. When I ran the set-up of W10 & Mint I had made very sure that I had disconnected the SATA cable from my main HD - a SSD so it did get put onto the 1 tb spare drive.

amiga500

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#1835971 2-Aug-2017 18:06

Couple of observations about printer set-up & size of OS updates.

Windows 95 plug in a common HP Printer & it would be recognised immediately with no drivers to install.

Linux Mint 18.2 and HP Deskjet turn on printer & 3 seconds a pop-up window with a message saying printer is installed and ready to use.

Windows 10 Download 212 mb from HP, which to be fair was very easy. 6.5 minutes with Windows Defender checking more than 96000 items! Run the printer installation which took a few minutes & it's working perfectly just like with Mint.

Kind of the same with updates for the OS itself. Mint did an update of about 150 mb & did not require an update. Windows 10 did a first update of a few items then I did the W10 'Creators Update' about 3 gigabytes & multiple reboots. Are you serious Microsoft??

amiga500

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#1945646 23-Jan-2018 19:05

Update - now Windows 10 build 1709 sets up my HP printer automatically. Pretty much the same functionality that was built into the Windows 3.11 setup process....

LesF

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#1998929 18-Apr-2018 19:46

Did that installer shrink the Windows partition and create a separate Linux partition, or did it just reserve a large file in the Windows file system and create a virtual file system inside that for Linux?

It is easy and fun to do a dual boot setup, tho I used to use a spare hard drive and keep them on separate hardware whenever possible.

These days I keep my old PC for Linux after a hardware upgrade, then the second older one for FreeBSD or similar, just cos I like to keep up with their progress and play around when gaming gets boring - eventually the really old hardware gets thrown out : )

--
Les