Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandGorgon | Hacker News Reader

The simplest, non-breaky, reinstall-tolerant way of dual booting is to install operating system on different partitions and NOT install grub or anything to the root/EFI partition.

Install your bootloader to the SAME partition as you installed linux in. This is not the default in either windows or linux - and it will try to scare you into not doing it. But do it!

Now, use your laptop's built in bios feature - "press f12 while rebooting" to select the disk to boot into. This will never fail. You can reinstall windows as many times as you like. You can burn your linux install and reinstall. They will never screw each other over and you will never be left unbootable.

View on HN

>Install your bootloader to the SAME partition as you installed linux in.

How does that even work? Is your motherboard able to read ext4 partitions?

I think that is only necessary for UEFI installations. I was able to do this earlier with extlinux[1]. This mentions a stackexchange question that suggests btrfs installations are possible in the same fashion[2].

[1] curl https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Syslinux | grep partitionless

[2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/103501/boot-partiot...

I think if you boot linux installer in UEFI mode, it will write partition hints to the EFI partition.

However, strictly speaking - modern bioses can scan bootable partitions.

I believe most BIOSes don't let you boot partitions, but only disk MBRs.

You can however install GRUB to USB stick and boot the USB stick from the BIOS. This also protects your Linux install against any Windows malware that doesn't change the BIOS if you are careful to remove the stick before booting Windows, put /boot on the USB stick as well and encrypt the Linux partition.

that's MBR mode. If you boot Linux in UEFI mode, it will write the correct bits of info.

I have generally not seen a non-UEFI bios or computer in the past 6-7 years. So you should be fine with UEFI.

Again, for some reason Linux installers scare you into using MBR mode. Its unnecessary now.

F12 will show partitions? Thats news to me honestly

It's a grey area. Not all BIOSes support scanning multiple EFI partitions. My desktop does, but my laptop doesn't.

really ? which laptop is this ? i generally maintain a do-not-buy list of laptops that are bad like this.

FYI- I had a Dell XPS laptop and it would work just fine.

I got it the wrong way round. My Dell Precision does, but my Gigabyte board doesn't. Apologies but I don't have the board model number to hand.

Anything that relies on your BIOS having a certain feature is a bad plan.

So computers are a bad plan?

You should consult your motherboard and thus BIOS specs before making any complex moves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com