How to combine 2 single OS drives to dual boot

[OldTech]

I have LM 18.0 on a 1 TB drive booting by itself. I also have another drive 750 MB that is using Win 10 by itself. At the present, I'm unplugging one and plugging up the other to use the OS I want at the time. I know this sounds strange but there is a good reason for it. WIN 10 worked well until a big update and crashed fatally. I reinstalled and restored from a previous backup and all was good until it updated and got to the update that caused the first problem. I did this several times and then just put LM 18.0 on it's own drive from scratch and booted up on that drive for my normal computing. Finally I used ? (can't remember the name) and erased and rewrote all of the win 10 hard drive and retired it. Something from work came up and forced me to reinstall win 10 and restore it back to the last save I had. It worked like it always did and I kept using it for several days. This time it didn't crash when the updates came (maybe MS fixed the update or reformatting the hard drive solved a problem?) and has been working without a hitch. I want to be able to connect both drives and dual boot like I used to. What do I have to do to get my dual boot configuration back? Windows was my primary drive.

Thanks!

[deepakdeshp]

Hello,
Please see http://www.linuxdeveloper.space/install ... ter-linux/
Use the Mint dvd in the above link instead of Ubuntu dvd or usb.

One option is to install Oracle virual box and run windows 10 as a virtual guest. This way you can take a snapshot of the guest and quickly restore to any kniwn point.
https://www.virtualbox.org
You can share folders between Mint and windows.
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2324980
As for your dual.boot question , if you have a facility to choose booting or disabling a drive from BIOS options, you can set up BIOS to boot from the required drive.
But if your computer supports uefi,
then please see
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2324980
Good luck

[fabien85]

Another option : put the Mint drive as the main one and make sure the Mint boot entry is at the top of the boot order (go into the firmware interface / BIOS to check that).
Boot Mint, plug the windows drive on the secondary port, open a terminal in Mint and issue

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

That should register the windows install in your grub menu. Reboot. You should get a grub menu giving you the option between Mint and windows.

[OldTech]

Another option : put the Mint drive as the main one and make sure the Mint boot entry is at the top of the boot order (go into the firmware interface / BIOS to check that).
Boot Mint, plug the windows drive on the secondary port, open a terminal in Mint and issue

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

That should register the windows install in your grub menu. Reboot. You should get a grub menu giving you the option between Mint and windows.

This is what I was looking for. I had seen the update-grub command and figured that was what I needed to do. I had had Windows as the primary drive but having it as the secondary is no problem as that is a better position if it fails again and I now like LM better than Windows.

I did as you said and got the grub menu as you said. LM works fine but Win 10 blue screens immediately. Maybe still a boot menu or something on the Win drive?

[OldTech]

Another option : put the Mint drive as the main one and make sure the Mint boot entry is at the top of the boot order (go into the firmware interface / BIOS to check that).
Boot Mint, plug the windows drive on the secondary port, open a terminal in Mint and issue

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

That should register the windows install in your grub menu. Reboot. You should get a grub menu giving you the option between Mint and windows.

This is what I was looking for. I had seen the update-grub command and figured that was what I needed to do. I had had Windows as the primary drive but having it as the secondary is no problem as that is a better position if it fails again and I now like LM better than Windows.

I did as you said and got the grub menu as you said. LM works fine but Win 10 blue screens immediately. Maybe still a boot menu or something on the Win drive?

Looks like that may have messed up Win 10. It had been doing well until I ran the grub command. I had previously had windows problems that didn't have anything to do with any other OS but none for a good period of time. I disconnected the LM drive and made Win 10 the primary and it still blue screens.

Oh well. I'll keep playing with it.

Thanks!

[fabien85]

sudo update-grub just changes the grub config file, which is located in the Mint drive. So it doesnt touch anything on the windows drive.
What may have happened is that windows didnt like to be booted via grub. That would be strange. Of note : grub chainloads to windows, i.e. it handles control to the windows bootloader, so what happens next is windows' responsibility.
I dont use windows personally, so cant help you debug that part. Maybe other forumers can. Good luck!

[OldTech]

sudo update-grub just changes the grub config file, which is located in the Mint drive. So it doesnt touch anything on the windows drive.
What may have happened is that windows didnt like to be booted via grub. That would be strange. Of note : grub chainloads to windows, i.e. it handles control to the windows bootloader, so what happens next is windows' responsibility.
I dont use windows personally, so cant help you debug that part. Maybe other forumers can. Good luck!

Thanks for your reply and all your help. I hadn't used Linux in about 7 1/2 years and had forgotten whatever I knew about it, but your first reply was what I was looking for. Don't know whether Win 10 has been my problem or whether the Windows drive has some sort of problem like bad sectors.

Merry Christmas!