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Gonna give Linux another try, any guidance is welcome! (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Dagnet@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Hey guys, after 2 years since my last attempt (and recently trying fedora on my laptop) Im ready to try again to install it on my desktop. First time I installed Nobara and it nuked my windows boots partition which caused a lot of trouble and trauma (couldnt boot into windows no matter what). Basically I want to accomplish this:

1- I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).
2- Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

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[-] Maiq@lemy.lol 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

If you have 2 separate drives each with their own boot loader and you tell your bios to boot from the grub bootloader and grub has successfully detected another OS like windows everything will be fine.

The trouble with dual booting comes from splitting a drive into partitions with different OS's on them sharing the same boot partition. Eventually windows will nuke grub and you will loose the ability to boot linux till you use a live USB to repair through chroot and fixing/installing grub manually or using a grub-repair live USB. Usually only gets complicated if you have luks set up.

I don't advise dual booting on a single drive. I intentionally buy gaming laptops with dual drive setups and keep the windows drive untouched till the warranty is out. Just in case i have to send it in for repair. Been doing this since 2004 without ever having any bootloader issues that I didn't cause myself.

this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
73 points (94.0% liked)

Linux

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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