can I install Cinnamon on a secondary primary drive?

[mark_oz]

Hi,

I have downloaded Cinnamon 18.3 to a usb and like enough to install on laptop. Everything I have read so far says that any OS has to be installed on a Primary partition. Laptop has a 228GB SSD (C:) with win7 and a secondary 1TB HDD (E:). In Disk Management, the Windows C: drive is labelled Healthy (Boot, Page File,Crash Dump, Primary Partition) while the Storage E: drive is labelled Healthy (Primary Partition).

When I go to shrink the C: drive, it says I can only allocate 27GB even though free space is noted as 156 GB.

Because the E: drive is empty with 930GB, I would like to use this if possible and use a 100GB.

I am experimenting with the laptop first before attempting anything on my main desktop computer.

Mark

[kc1di]

hello Mark and Welcome to Linux Mint Forums,

You should have no problem installing Mint on the other HDD. only thing that will need to be installed on the primary drive will be the boot files. If it's UEFI machine that meand a couple of small files If it's a bios boot then grub should be install in the primary Disc's MBR.

You'll have to do manual partitioning when you get to the point in the install that show the type where to install select other and make a new ext4 partion on the second /empty drive. (I would make three partitions one about 40 gbs for the / partition. One of about 4gbs for a swap partition and the rest for a /home partition. When that's finished install the installer will take care of the rest. you should not have to shrink your window drive at all. Only thing that will change is the boot. But it should pick up your Windows drive and place an entry in grub to boot windows. linux will be first boot thought. That can be changed latter if you want. Good Luck.

Please read the installation guide found here before you install : https://linuxmint-installation-guide.re ... en/latest/
and this it'sfoss article may be helpful : https://itsfoss.com/guide-install-linux ... t-windows/

[mark_oz]

kc1di,

In my enthusiasm and lack of patience to wait for my question to be posted, I eagerly (read stupidly) attempted to install on the smaller 27GB unfortunately this did not seem to work. The installer accepted all the inputted values and supposedly finished the install, but did NOT boot into any form of Linux whatsoever. After removing the USB drive, laptop still booted to Windows.

Scratching head raw.

Mark

[kc1di]

27 Gbs is too small.
Read the post and links then try again.

[cabbagetreemo]

In case it helps, I have a previous post where I struggled and then succeeded to dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint on separate hard drives

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=242797&p=1297990#p1297990

I would guess that you can fix whatever you did with that 27 GB partition by reformatting it (careful not to hurt Windows) and reassigning the space to Windows before installing Mint using the method in my thread.