Linux And Windows Dual Boot - Two Hard Drives
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Today, Bob asks:
Matt, Just read your answer to the question about which distribution of Linux to run, and your warning about dual booting. I agree with you 100%. But my question is, how come, with hard drive prices so low, and modern computers, now will boot from almost any drive, doesn’t anyone advocate just installing to a new drive. Choose the drive from which to boot, and be done with it? Thanks, keep up the good advice.
Well, I see a couple of possible reasons that keep people from doing this:
1) The user has a drive that is 160GBs or more, they likely rationalize; “why do I need more”?
2) Wubi handles this problem for the user, as the boot record is left alone and it is very easy to remove if needed.
But in the end, you are right, it is simple enough to use two hard drives, once the user understands how to do this with a switch or hot-swappable bays.
If it was me, I would use something ‘like’ this product, which makes switching hard drives as simple as pushing a button. In most cases, the hard drive drive selector will need to support SATA as IDE is so yesterday…
Short of the IDE vs SATA concern, it does provide a fantastic, bullet proof method for dual-booting without relying on GRUB/MBR issues of any sort. I highly recommend it.
Do you have an Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Simply Mepis, Linspire/Freespire, or PCLinuxOS related question? Perhaps you are just burnt out on writing on the walls with crayons? Whatever the comments may be, drop me a line, and you too can “Just Ask Matt” - Linux Edition!
4 Comments
Daniel
September 5th, 2007
at 11:09am
I see two more reasons not to use another drive:
1) You use a notebook, so you can’t install a second hard drive and, as for carrying a usb drive, apart from cables, AC adapter, etc… well, then it’s not so much more convenient than dual booting anymore.
2) On desktops, there is still the trouble of switching drives every time (if one doesn’t use a product like the one mentioned in the article), be it by opening the cpu case or by entering the BIOS and changing the boot order; it really is easier to choose an option from a boot menu (which you can use even if the OSes are in different drives, as well).
In the end, as with almost everything, nowadays dual booting is not as “dangerous” or complicated as before :)
Matt Hartley
September 7th, 2007
at 9:51am
Sounds like going Wubi might be a better approach, then. No dealing with any external headaches. :)
Sibyl
July 3rd, 2008
at 5:46am
I have a new HP Pavillion notebook with two SATA hard drive bays. Windows Vista SP is 1 installed on one drive and the other is presently empty. I have an extra hard drive on which I want to install Linux, probably SUSE 11.0. If GRUB is installed in the MBR of the Windows drive in the first bay, then if the Linux drive crashes, I won’t be able to get to Windows. Can I just move the Windows disk to the second bay, install Linux and GRUB on the drive in the first bay, and still be able to boot Windows by selection through GRUB? That way, if Linux fails, I can just move the Windows drive back to the first bay, or if the BIOS allows it–I haven’t checked yet–just boot from the 2nd bay.
Fred Flinstone
August 4th, 2008
at 12:04pm
I just finished a quite similar setup to the one you propose, Sibyl; I’m using two hard drives for the purpose of a RAID0 setup. I set up the windows boot manager on the mbr of one disk, and grub on the mbr of the other disk. The disk with grub is set to boot in BIOS, but I can change the option to boot the other disk (in which case the windows boot manager). With grub, however, I can boot windows as well. So yes, you should have no problem with what you propose. Cheers