Got an old laptop from a friend I’d like to rejuvenate, the plan is to set up a light distro so it wouldn’t be as slow as it is right now with windows 10.
Now, I’m aware windows updates can fuck up a dual boot system, so i have a few questions about how to minimize the threat of that happening.
What i think of doing is running a few scans to check the disk, then setting up Linux Mint, because it is beginner friendly, and (relatively) light weight.
What I’d need help with is trusted guides and also tips for setting up dual booting, I’m sure I’ll need to do disk partitioning and I’ve done that before but I’d still want to make sure I’m doing it correctly.
Any help would be welcome.
The Linux mint installer has an option built-in to create a dualboot. Just follow their guide and be sure to select “install alongside windows 10” at step 5.
Following the guide as i write this :)
Make sure to disable Windows hybrid sleep. If your system isn’t shutdown properly and you access the Windows partition from another system that can destroy data.
If you just want to keep the data on the Windows partition and usually don’t need to run Windows, I’d remove the Windows drive and keep it somewhere safe, and get another SSD for Linux. That way, the two systems are completely separate and can do nothing to each other.
Swap is mostly a crutch for too little RAM, if the system doesn’t have enough the best solution would be an upgrade. If that’s not possible, consider zram-swap, or if you have to, swap to an SSD (that will reduce its lifespan, though maybe not in a relevant manner). If you swap to an old HDD you won’t have much fun using the system.
Hybrid sleep was luckily already disabled, and the laptop has 8GB ram so it should be fine.
If the laptop supports dual drives (not unheard of but not the norm) it’s way safer to dual boot from different physical drives.
Whatever OS you choose make sure they have a guide for dual-booting. Any Linux OS should be capable of dual-boot but not all will support that configuration equally.
As a failsafe I would also make a rescue USB, especially SystemRescue because of the findroot option.
I dual booted a machine and I had to even unplug my windows drive to get it to install a Linux distro on the other drive. Windows really does not like playing nice with dual boot systems so it is always best to keep Windows on its own drive.
I’d really like to not open up the device and mess with it, kinda need it for use soon, so i cant afford the time.
Also, i agree, but just disabling the ability to boot through windows should be enough for now, by the time I’d need more control, i can safely say the old files aren’t needed, and can ditch the windows partition.
Hey OP, how did the installation went?
Swimmingly :)
The laptop is way faster and apparently installing clang is super simple, so developing on linux is expected to go smooth.
I’m going to go with what one of the commenters said and disable the windows booting option and install an NTFS reading program to reach the files in that partition.
I’m very glad i did this, it was planned for months and now I’m very excited :D
I’m really glad to hear that! Happy Linuxing :)
Had a linux moment yesterday, piped “clang --help” into grep to find something, it wasn’t there but the piping itself was awesome.
Don’t have anybody else to tell lol
Thanks for telling me lol. I remember sharing your enthusiasm when I started.
If you don’t mind me sharing, here are some tools I use the most in the console:
- htop: resource monitoring and process killing. Mint has a GUI alternative
- btop: better resource monitoring, but worse process killing than htop.
- lazygit: amazing interface for git. Seems hard to get started, but IMO, not at all. There are GUI alternatived.
- tmux: multiple consoles and console manager. A bit hard to get started.
- nano: text editor. Reeaaaallly simple to use, prefer it over emacs and vi/vim.
- grep: you already know this one.
- cronjobs/crontab: allows you to run periodical commands. Say, a cleanup script all days at 7:08 AM.
Also, some GUI programs I love:
- KDE Connect: device pairing with your cellphone and PC. Includes remote mouse input, multimedia control and file sharing.
- Steam: Almost all the games I play on Steam run flawlessly on Linux.
- Stellarium: astronomy/planetary app.
Pick your poison lol. If you don’t mind, we can start talking via ptivate message.
Saved for late :^)
If it isn’t for professional reasons you absolutely can’t avoid, I would switch wholesale. As a once famous song said “Freedom isn’t free. It costs folks like you and me. Andif you don’t put in your buck o five who will?”
It’s not for professional reasons, it’s all personal, plus studies, I’m not switching wholesale because i might need to access the old files (extremely unlikely, but I don’t want to make decisions based on that), and the laptop has enough stirage for me to be happy with the partition i made, which is ~200GB
I can appreciate that. Especially if the files in question are of sentimental value.
I would suggest transferring your files to a new drive anyway because of bit rot.
Being the typical helpful (pushy and self-important) Linux user, I might add there is no reason you can´t transfer them to Linux 😜
I dual boot for two years, because I need a special software for work every couple of months. I mounted my old windows drive in Linux and soft linked it from my Linux home directory. So if I go to home > documents I see my new documents, plus there is a “documents archive” folder, that takes me to my windows drive with it’s older documents. I added these soft links to my music, pictures as well. This works great.
I never experienced any problems with windows destroying my boot options. I’m not an expert, but managed to setup GRUP to instantly boot Linux (Mint). If I want windows, I need to push the boot menu key (F11) and actively select it. Otherwise I don’t even notice it’s even there.
A couple of days ago I setted up my pc with dual boot; I recommend to install Windows first and then install the distro you want with a swap partition of at least 16Gb and on the linux install options choose GRUB as bootloader
Thanks, a few questions, what is a swap partition, and why is it needed?
Also i have a ton of free storage so the linux install will probably have over 200gb in its partition
A swap partition is akin to the page file on Windows. The kernel will use it to move memory pages it doesn’t anticipate using in the near future to it so it can use that RAM for other things. It will also use it in a pinch when there isn’t enough RAM on the system. It isn’t strictly necessary, but it can prevent programs from crashing at a huge performance penalty. It is necessary if you want to use sleep or hibernate or whatever it’s called when it is powered off physically but resumes what you were doing instead of booting when you power it back on. That takes as much swap as you have RAM at minimum. If you want that, a good rule of thumb is 1.5 times physical RAM.
I have servers I administer for my job that have over 100GB of RAM with very little swap, like 4GB. The applications and machine are tuned and sized so the physical RAM is at ~85% and swap is barely used. The swap is mainly for non application stuff like IDS agent, backup agent, monitoring agent, etc.
If swap becomes a problem, you can adjust the kernel vm.swappiness parameter as needed. It might take some trial and error to get it right.
Source: I’ve been working with Linux professionally for almost 20 years now.
@BlackRoseAmongThorns @daisyKutter Swap is a place on disk that gets used as a slow, temporary place to put memory when your RAM is full. Windows uses a swap file on an existing partition, while Linux generally uses a dedicated partition instead (although you can use a swap file if you really want to).
Appropriate sizes for the swap partition are hotly debated. Twice the size of your RAM if you have a small amount, or the same size as your RAM if you have lots is a good approximation.
I did that once and it wasn’t a nice experience. Windows will always find ways to screw things up and you’ll constantly be dealing with their shitfuckery. Outside of gaming there aren’t really many reasons to stick with Windows and even gaming works great except on titles where it is explicitly sabotaged by the publishers. If you’re dealing with an older laptop, this likely isn’t a consideration anyway. If you’re unsure whether Linux is for you, my advice would be to install it in a VM first and see if it works for you. Chances are, you won’t miss Windows at all.
These days with UEFI it’s much less likely to break things. Worse case though you just boot from a LIVE USB boot, chroot in and rerun grub/your bootloader installer. Often even if windows puts its own bootloader first, you can choose your bootloader from the bios boot menu and just rerun the bootloader installer.
It used to be a lot worse.
Windows is the old OS i have a reason to keep, otherwise it would be all linux.
You probably know most of it so just some advice: Don’t format the Partition table (MBR to GPT etc.) on the disk whose data you wish to keep.
Shrinking a partition or moving it carries a small risk of data loss and will take significantly longer than creating a new partition (since data needs to be cut and pasted from one area of the disk to another). If your old laptop has an empty slot for another SSD or NVME drive you can plug that in, and still dualboot and having the new drive Linux only.
Also to deal with the occasional Windows cockups, just carry a boot-repair USB, the auto repair has fixed the Windows issue for me 90% of the time (the other times are usually boot order priority or other BIOS setting)
I haven’t done this recently enough to guide you on the details, but step zero is to decide whether you are certain you want to dual boot or not. It adds a lot of complexity and brittleness that is best avoided if at all possible.
- Try to find Linux compatible replacements for the software you need.
- if that doesn’t exist, see if you can run it on Linux with wine.
- If that isn’t possible, consider running windows inside a virtual machine on Linux.
- If you do want honest, bare-metal windows then using two different physical drives will be easier and more reliable. Ideally your laptop has room for two drives, otherwise you can dangle a USB SSD (not a flash drive). Windows won’t install to a USB drive but Linux doesn’t care.
Yeah for anything except some games, wine/lutris or a virtual machine will work wonders. Not having to reboot is much nicer. You can also consider booting windows off a fast usb stick or usb ssd.
For me personally, having to reboot is part of why I like my dual boot. I have adhd, so it’s good to keep gaming entirely separate from anything productive.
Thats a good point tbh. Nice brain hack
Now if only it kept me away from the Wikipedia rabbit hole haha
Something kinda funny, installing clang is extremely simple, and gcc was preinstalled, so i already got a C development environment on vs code :)
Maybe I’ll try getting a different code editor, to simplify things even more, it’ll take a while though, for now vs code should be fine
I’m going to use it for software development as im studying software engineering in uni, so probably not much else, and windows is the old OS of said device, so i just need to limit the windows partition and make a new linux one
Your best option by far is to overwrite windows completely. For most software development Linux is way better anyway.
I wouldn’t recommend duel booting on one drive.
I’ve done it before and hated it. As many pointed out windows will just destroy that partition because it wants to.
I’d honestly just stick with windows if you are going to need it.
If you don’t need it I’d just wipe the drive and install mint.
Duel booting can work well but usually only on separate drives
My advice: Don’t setup dual boot.
Instead, setup Virtualbox in your Linux instance, and install Windows in a VM. You’ll have access to a windows “crutch”, without having to leave Linux to use it.
Windows will actively attempt to destroy your Linux partition at every opportunity, you can dual boot but it won’t be a fun experience.
I dual boot Fedora with secure boot enabled for half a year already on my notebook with exactly 0 problems. Did few Windows updates already.
I’ll try disabling the windows boot like someone said, and read the partition from linux, is enough to avoid the possibility.
If you’re willing to go that far at that point it’s probrally easier (and more stable) to just completely overwrite your windows partitions.
Look i appreciate the help but you didn’t read the rest of the thread, i have a reason to keep it, it non negotiable.
I’ll probrally be one of the few people here to say this but tbh if you need Windows then don’t feel pressured to use Linux. Its not worth (IMO) the stability loss to dualboot, feel free to keep using Windows.
It’s about the files, not the OS
@BlackRoseAmongThorns why? 🤔 😂 fuck dual boot, boot directly into Linux
Kinda need the old OS, it’s a close friend’s computer and it took too long to get just a few files out of it, i want to keep the rest just in case we missed something.
(Also I don’t want to just backup the whole ass hard drive)
You’re messing with partitions which means there is the potential for data loss, be it hardware, human error, or a random cat. You should, if the data is important to you, have a backup.
You could leave the Windows installation and not dual boot. Linux can read NTFS volumes. You will probably have to install ntfsprogs or whatever it’s called.
If i understand correctly, i could leave the windows install as is, but disable it from appearing during boot, and install a program to read the files from the windows partition?
If so that’s actually a perfect solution :)
Yes.
To do this, open a terminal, and do this:
sudo apt search ntfs
It will be called something like ntfs-progs or ntfs-fuse or both.
Then:
sudo apt install PKG1 PKG2
Alternatively, the synaptic package tool has a nice GUI
I’m finally back, apparently linux mint comes with ntfs handling out of the box, just opened the file explorer (nemo), and opened a picture successfully.
Only step left is disabling booting through windows.
AFAIK on most distros and desktop environments the default file manager can read NTFS partitions without any further setup needed.
I will check if mint does tomorrow, would be very nice if it does :)
Oh, you mentioned you don’t want to keep a backup of the entire drive. That is fine, but absolutely back it up before starting the install.
I would just boot a live Linux image and dd the entire device file onto some sort of storage. That way you can get a bit for bit copy of the drive that you can make it how it was before you touched it. When all is well, then you can ditch the backup. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep if the stuff is important. Storage devices do fail.
I’d get a new drive. Install a sane os and needed tools and use that. They should be cheap these days. Put the old one in a safe place in case you need something from it. When you find it years on and notice that there was nothing important there after all, recycle it. That’s a much safer approach.
