Hi everyone, I am wanting to gradually make the switch from windows to Linux on my daily use desktop. I figured the best way would be to dual boot them. I have a spare drive in my desktop that I cleaned for Linux so I can have it on a separate drive from windows. Here the process I went through which ended up being unsuccessful. Removed windows drive, installed mint on seperate SSD, install was successful, installed steam and tried some games, shut down PC, put windows drive back in PC, PC wouldn’t boot to windows drive but was still booting to mint, went into BIOS and selected boot over ride to windows drive, still wouldn’t boot, created windows recovery USB, tried to fix boot in recovery mode, recovery media wasn’t able to fix boot, booted into mint, mounted windows drive and removed all the documents I needed to external drive, nuked windows and Linux drives and did a fresh install of windows.
Afterward, I googled how to do this properly. And the posts I found detailed basically the same process I did. I would like to try again but I don’t know what I did wrong and don’t want to have to go through that again.
Thanks.
PS. I have an extensive library in steam already. There’s several games that I have hours into and have friends that I play with, which is why I want to keep windows for the time being while I figure out how Linux gaming works.
EDIT: thanks for all the comments. It appears my problem was when I removed my windows drive from my PC when installing mint. I will try again and keep both drives in my PC. Thanks!
It doesn’t matter what you pick, there’s so much to learn and so much grass is greener thought process going on that barring a irl group to conform to or workplace requirement you’re gonna try a million different things before you figure it out.
If you use mint, the step you need to pay attention during and read instructions for asks if you wanna “install alongside windows”.
Just make sure you recognize the drive/partition you want to use and if you don’t, take note of the way the installer describes them and figure out which one is which.
If you decide to go with bazzite I can check out how that one presents the choice too.
That’s good to know. I would prefer using mint because I’ve been using it in my laptop for a while now and I’m comfortable with it. I really appreciate your help and time answering my questions. I will try dual booting again this weekend.