Over the past 12-15 years I’ve always had at least one PC set up to dual boot Windows and Linux.
Windows and Linux seemed to always sort of play nice until the BIOS became the UEFI — then it started to become more difficult because many times the boot.ini or MBR partition was write protected by Microsoft itself so there was no way to edit or configure (short of the shell or cmd if even that) a pointer to the Linux partition. Writing a pointer to the sda2 partition in GRUB was about the only way you could boot into the Windows partition it seemed. The trick here was to be sure that your system picked up GRUB outside of the MBR first, otherwise it was going to be just Windows with no other option available to enter the Linux partition.
When I get out on to the interwebs and look around at all of the tutorials that involve dual-booting these two operating systems, I can begin to understand why so many get confused.
Everyone out there is at a different experience level, and though each solution may work out at the end of the day, it all just comes down to how much time and effort you figure you want to spend doing this.
I’ve pretty much had my fill of GParted, MiniTool Partition Wizards, AOMEI Partition Assistant’s, or any of the other 3rd party partitioning tools out there. 3rd party software usually comes with a bunch of adware and malware junk anyway, so don’t waste your time.
Microsoft Windows already has the tools you need to reduce, expand, or create new partition(s) anyway, so you might be better off and dollars ahead by just using what Microsoft offers.
I pretty much quit buying laptops and PC’s over the counter quite some time ago because they are fairly limited in their over all capabilities. Not only are they extremely low powered as a rule, but their UEFI/BIOS are pretty limited as far as configurations.
Recently I built another new PC basically from scratch and put Windows 10 Pro on it. Contrary to popular belief, Windows 10 will install and boot without having to use secure boot, so that’s what I ended up doing. After the install, I split the main partition thus giving the Windows 10 only 1 terabyte instead of having two. Then I went in and installed Linux Mint in the second partition. All of this was done without having to use secure boot by the way. Once the Linux portion was installed, I rebooted and I was presented with a screen that gave me a choice of which partition to boot into. Windows was using the MBR side on sda2 and the Linux side was using GRUB on sda1.
Simple enough I suppose, but now I figured it might be time to upgrade to Windows 11. Before I could do the upgrade, I had to go into the BIOS and set the UEFI Secure Boot, and enable the TPM 2.0.
Once I had done that, I upgraded to Windows 11. When I rebooted after the upgrade, I didn’t get the screen that gave me the option of which partition to boot into. It went straight into Windows 11.
I rebooted again and this time went into the BIOS and set the boot to UEFI Secure Boot with Legacy Support. (ASUS gives you a few options as far as boot configurations: UEFI Secure Boot, UEFI Secure Boot w/Legacy Support, Legacy, or just plain old Other OS.)
I saved the configuration and continued to boot. I was once again presented with a screen that gave me a choice of which partition to boot into. Windows 11 is happy because it has it’s UEFI Secure Boot in the MBR on the sda2, and Linux Mint is happy because it gets to use it’s GRUB over on the sda1.
I use ASUS Motherboards for nearly all of my builds. The only time I don’t is if a customer wants something different.
I purchase the ASUS gaming motherboards mostly because they are the most flexible as far as configuration is concerned.
At the end of the day I’ve got a new PC set up to boot both of the latest versions of Linux Mint and Microsoft Windows.
Thanks for the read
Happy Trails
