Dual Boot Windows 10 and Linux Ubuntu on Separate Hard Drives

[duplicate]

This should work for most systems that use UEFI and which have two HDD.

Dell Inspiron E5440. -Main HDD - 256GB Samsung SSD (Windows 10 installed) -Secondary HDD -
64GB Transcend mSATA SSD (Mint 18 was installed to this drive)

A) UEFI/BIOS - 1) Set to UEFI mode only (no legacy/CSM). 2) Disable secure boot 3) Disable Intel
Rapid Start (if equipped) 3) Disable fast boot in UEFI (note this is different than the "fastboot" setting
in Windows 8/10). The options in your UEFI/BIOS might say something like Full/Minimal/Automatic
for boot mode. Select Full (or thorough, or complete, etc whatever your UEFI vendor has chosen to
call it).

B) Disable fastboot in Windows 8/10 under advanced power options. Restart computer to ensure that
this subsequent boot and the next reboot/shutdown will be in "normal" mode.

B1) Optional - Install Macrium Reflect (free) and create a backup image and reinstallation media
should something go wrong with Windows 10.

C) Use Rufus to create a bootable USB stick with your choice of Ubuntu based distro. Make sure in
Rufus that you CHOOSE the option UEFI/GPT only. This ensures the Linux environment boots only
into UEFI mode during your install.

D) Reboot computer and press key for one time boot menu (Dell is typically F12). Selected your USB
stick from the boot options - note make sure it says UEFI in front of the USB stick in the boot menu. If
not, return to Windows and recreate your USB stick with Rufus ensuring you choose the UEFI/GPT
(only) option.

E) Boot into Linux live environment and begin install.

F) When you get to the installation option, choose SOMETHING ELSE at the bottom of the Ubiquity
installer.

G) Find your secondary HDD that you will be installing Linux to. In my case it was listed as /dev/sdc
(with /dev/sda being the windows drive and /dev/sdb the USB drive [which was invisible in the
installer]). Partition the target drive as follows: -select Make New Partition Table -1st partition,
650MB size, EFI as the type (this will list as /dev/sdb1 efi in the partitioning tool once you create it) -
2nd partition, 10GB min (20+GB better), mountpoint is root (/) ext4 as file system -3rd partition, 2GB
min, swap, (if you wish to use hibernation, the swap needs to be just slightly larger than your total
amount of RAM - example I have 8GB so the size of this parition was set at 9000MB) -4th partition,
remainder of space on drive, mountpoint home (/home), ext4 as file system
IMPORTANT

F) BEFORE clicking "Install Now", from the "device for boot loader installation" option button, select
the 650MB EFI partition you just created as the target for the bootloader. (example /dev/sdc1 in my
case). Then click "Install Now".

G) Finish installation process. And reboot (removing the USB stick when your UEFI/BIOS screen
logo appears).

Upon reboot, after UEFI/BIOS reads the new bootloader entry that Linux has added to it, you will be
presented with the grub menu with a listing of your Linux distro as well as a listing to boot Windows
10. Boot into Linux. Install any updates and then reboot and attempt to enter Windows 10 from the
grub menu to make sure that grub correctly handles the hand-off to the Windows 10 bootloader.

WHAT YOU HAVE DONE. You have installed the Linux EFI bootloader to the newly created EFI
partition. In the process of this, Linux has added an entry to your UEFI listings in your systems
UEFI/BIOS. Linux has also automatically detected your Windows 10 install and added a grub menu
item to boot it. Your computer at this point will now automatically boot to Linux unless you choose to
boot to Windows (from the Grub menu).

What you haven't done. You haven't in any way altered your Windows 10 install or its bootloader or
even so much as touched the Windows 10 EFI partition. Everything is reversible simply by removing
the Linux UEFI listing from your UEFI/BIOS settings. How to do so varies from each vendor.
 Dual-boot Ubuntu 14.04 &
Windows 7 on a PC with 2 HDDs
and UEFI firmware
May 31, 2014 9:13 am
This post shows how to dual-boot Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7 on a computer with two hard disk drives
(HDD) and UEFI firmware. The test computer used for this tutorial has a 500 GB and a 320 GB hard drives
connected, with Windows 7 Pro installed on the 500 GB HDD. The screenshots and descriptions in this tutorial
show how to install Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on the 320 GB and setting up the Ubuntu 14.04 boot manager as the
default boot device.

The steps involved are:

Download an installation image of Ubuntu 14.04 from here and burn it to a DVD or transfer it to a USB
stick
Install Ubuntu 14.04 on the target HDD
Set Ubuntus boot manager as the default boot device

Ready? Lets get started.

Step 2. Install Ubuntu 14.04: Assuming Step 1 has been completed, reboot the computer with the installation
media in the optical drive or in a USB port. Launch the installer and click through the first steps until you get
to the step shown in this image. It is very likely that the installer will inform you that This computer currently
has no detected operating systems. What would you like to do? Select the Something else option, then
click Continue.

That should open the installers Advanced Partitioning Tools window. The two HDDs should be labeled as
/dev/sda and /dev/sdb and their partitions should be listed directly under them. For the computer used in this
tutorial, the target HDD is /dev/sda. Whatever you do here, dont touch the Windows 7 HDD. As shown in this
screenshot, the target HDD has no partitions on it, so I only needed to select the free space and clicked on
the + button to start creating partitions. If yours has existing partitions on it, you may first have to delete them
before creating new partitions.

That should open the installers partition editor. If you are new to the concept of disk partitions in Linux, it is
highly recommended that you read Guide to disks and disk partitions in Linux. For an installation on a
computer with UEFI firmware, you need at least three partitions, one of which must be an EFI partition. For
this tutorial, four partitions were created the EFI partition, and three other partitions. One is mounted at /
(root), another at /home and the last is for Swap. For each partition that youll create at this step, all you need
to modify are the values for Size, Use as and Mount point.

The first partition will be the EFI partition. The default size allocated by the Ubuntu installer for this partition
is about 536 MB. From the Use as menu, select EFI boot partition. OK.

For the root partition, a disk space of 20 GB (20,000 MB) should be more than enough. The minimum required
is actually 6.4 GB, so the extra should take care of future growth in disk usage. For file system (Use as), you
may select the default (Ext4) or even btrfs. Be sure to select / from the Mount point menu. OK.

For the /home partition, assign the disk space you think you need and select /home for the mount point. OK.
For the Swap partition, a size of 4 GB (4000 MB) should be enough. From the Use as menu, select swap
area. OK.

Back to the main partitioning window, you should see all the newly created partitions. Did you notice that we
did not create a boot partition? Thats because on these systems, the EFI partition serves as the boot partition.
Boot files for GRUB will be installed there. GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader) is the boot program used
by Ubuntu and virtually all Linux distributions. Before clicking Install Now, change the entry in the Device
for boot loader installation from /dev/sda to /dev/sda1. /dev/sda1 is the EFI partition.
It should look like the one shown in this screenshot. Install Now

Step 3. Set the Default Boot Device: After Step 2 has completed successfully, reboot the computer. Before it
reboots into the default boot device, press the F key that will take you to the boot menu. For my computer, it is
the F11 key. This screenshot shows the entries in the boot menu of the computer used for this tutorial.
The AHCI P3: WDC WD5000 entry is /dev/sdb, the Windows 7 installation HDD, while the AHCI P2:
WDC WD3200 entry is /dev/sda, the Ubuntu installation HDD. Selectnig either entry will cause a boot
failure. To boot into the Windows 7 or Ubuntu 14.04 HDD, select the matching OS entry. In this screenshot, it
is either Ubuntu or Windows Boot Manager.

After verifying that you can boot into Windows 7 and Ubuntu 14.04, you should get into your systems UEFI
setup utility and set the default boot device to Ubuntu, which should have entries for Ubuntu 14.04 and
windows 7 in the GRUB menu. You might want to read Boot managers and boot devices on a PC with
UEFI firmware for a brief discussion of the subject in this step.