Solved Have: Win7, Linux Mint 17.3, how to add Linux Mint 18.3

[danost]

I have a one tera hard drive on which is installed Windows 7 and LinuxMint 17.3, I boot into each of these via bios, not boot manager.
I'd like to add LinuxMint 18.3 to this drive and as 18.3 is setup and running well, to then uninstall 17.3.
Need instructions to accomplish this addition of 18.3, and
need instructions to later uninstall 17.3
Your good advice will be very much appreciated
Thank you
Dan

[danost]

Oops, sorry, forgot: I'm running Cinnamon desktop on 17.3 and have downloaded 18.3 with Cinnamon also, and burned 18.3 to DVD

[Pierre]

the bios may not be able to handle booting Three Systems,
& so you may have to boot to an LinuxMint Boot Menu & select the required one from there.

you will, of course, need another Logical Partition to place the new LinuxMint system into.
- do make any necessary adjustments to the HDDs partition layout, from an boot-able Live Environment,
and not from the current / running LinuxMint 17x system . . .

so you could use the new LinuxMint 18x media to make those adjustments,
and install to that newly created partition.
- this new system will auto-detect both existing systems & add them both to it's boot menu.

later on, you can just delete the older LinuxMint 17x partition, from the same boot-able Live Environment,
and then boot back into the new LinuxMint 18x & update it's Grub Boot Menu.

[danost]

Thanks so much for this, I hope to try this soon.
Dan

[Reddog1]

I did something similar on a laptop a while back, but with Windows 8.1, Mint 17.1 and Suse 11. Windows and Mint 17 were up and running--using GParted I made a new ext4 partition for Suse. I didn't make a new swap because I guessed (correctly) that Suse would see the Mint swap and use it as its own. Then, I booted with a Suse Live USB stick and, when I got to the choices menu, I set the install to the new drive/partition that I'd made with Gparted. Suse installed without a hitch. One thing that I didn't actually foresee was that Suse's installer would overwrite Mint's grub with its own, which looked different than what I'm used to. Suse found the Windows install and the Mint 17 install (I think it labeled it 'Ubuntu') and everything worked. Later, in Mint 17, I ran 'update grub' and it replaced the Suse version with the Mint grub, with everything working. My bios was UEFI and, because I had left everything set at the Mint install I didn't need to do anything to prepare it for adding Suse. My guess is that when you install Mint 18 alongside Mint 17 the Mint 18 grub will just add a boot option for Mint 17 and Windows, but i haven't done it.

[slipstick]

I have exactly those three systems on my computer. My computer came with W7 installed in UEFI mode and a GPT drive, so adding partitions was no problem (currently have 13 partitions). The first paragraph of this post explains my setup (the rest of the post just explains how I backup with backintime):

viewtopic.php?f=90&t=268028&p=1460130#p1460130

[danost]

Many thanks for your very helpful information, very much appreciated.
I will have to read again and again the details of your post on symbolic links and more to try to digest this stuff, its new to me, yet the end result does sound great.
Thanks again
Dan