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On 21/01/18 15:34, Neil wrote: > I should also mention that I have seen several examples recently of > people saying to avoid dual boot, especially if it a case of MS Windows > alongside Linux. Far better to find an old computer to use, apparently. Normally this'll work out just fine Neil, with a few notable exceptions - dual booting from a single internal disk partitioned for multiple operating systems is chief amongst these. It's unfortunately the most common scenario however, and a dual Windows+Linux setup the most common of those and can be quite fragile. Dual booting completely different OSs from separate disks is much safer, or keeping a USB stick to run Linux from. That being said as long as you follow a couple of rules even dual booting Windows+Linux from a single drive is perfectly fine you just have to: 1: Always install Windows first 2: Linux/BSD/whatever is installed after Windows 3: Be prepared for Windows to destroy your bootloader during big updates sometimes - you'll need a Linux live system to repair this and reinstall GRUB occasionally As ever, behaviour wildly differs between modern UEFI+GPT and legacy BIOS+MBR systems: EFI based booting *should* be much more robust and resistant to accidental trashing of boot loaders etc as operating systems should be capable of writing their boot configurations to the same FAT32 EFI partition without clobbering other coexisting entries. I'm not going to lie to you though, in practice this just hasn't lived up to it's promise (surprise surprise...) and modern UEFI systems can actually be even more of a pain in the arse to configure and maintain dualboot on than crappy old BIOS systems. If in doubt, just buy another (cheap, preferably SSD) disk to experiment on - you can never have enough fast disk storage lying around anyway. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq