other distros on solus drive or Win drive?

brent

SOLUS=HDD, all by itself, primary drive
WIN 10=SSD, all by itself, secondary drive

A project I'd like to undertake soon. Was impressed with two newer distros and liked them Live. Now I want to install them. (No I cannot learn VM right now.)

Better to install 2 linux distros alongside Solus on the HDD?
Or shoehorn 2 linux distros alongside windows on the SSD?

Am not intimidated making moves in Windows Disk management/DISKPART or linux gparted.
I've never done this before. Just a question about destination/logistics before I begin.
All thoughts welcome. Thank you.

528491

I like to test distros bare metal so here are my experiences:
You can easily install multiple uefi OS's along each other on the same disk if

You create a separate uefi partition for each OS
You use the uefi boot menu to chose which OS to boot
You have backed up all the data (your restic questions helped me too, so I know you did that already 😛 )

My procedure goes like this:

Boot up the live system you want to install (or any other live system that has gparted or likewise)
Create some space on your disk for the new OS
Let's say your solus disk has partitions like:
#1 fat32 boot 512MB
#2 swap 4GB
#3 ext4 solus 60GB
#4 ext4 home 440GB

Then resize #4 to leave some empty space to its right:
.
.
.
#4 ext4 home 380GB
free space 60GB

create a new 512MB fat32 partition and set the boot flag
create a new ext4 partition with the rest of the free space
Apply all, close gparted
Start the installer and choose the new ext4 partition to install the os onto and the 512 boot partition to install the boatloader onto (in case of another solus install you may have to work around by disabling boot flags)

I did this several times on different machines (all uefi only) and it works almost every time without any hiccups.
BUT: Some strange things happened very rarely. One time i installed Debian which i lastly did like 10 years ago, so i was unfamiliar with its installer. Resized some shit and after the installation i was able to boot solus but it was going completely crazy. So you should always have a backup and (depending on the way you backed up) be willing to do some reinstalling if something should go wrong.

brent

528491 #4 ext4 home 380GB
free space 60GB

create a new 512MB fat32 partition and set the boot flag

--so if I liked 2-3 bare metal tests, I would then, in turn, leave free space after that 60GB when I begin another partition? And so on.
(thanks for the great answer)

528491

brent exactly. On my gf's laptop it looks like this:

(originally a dual boot, added another linux os later so windows lives in the middle)

brent

528491 that picture rocks, thank you. You prefer I do this alongside Solus and not WIN, right? Because of all the Ext formatting? or does it matter? thanks again

tomscharbach

brent In response to your question on another thread ("WIN on one disk and Solus on another, where would you prefer to test/run bare metal install distros (non-VM)? I have Solus and WIN both backed up and ready to go. For some reason I can't get over the "where" hurdle. I think the WIN SSD the better pick but I don't know. Thanks"):

I would elect would install on the WIN drive. If you install on the WIN drive, Grub (I'm assuming that whatever distros you are installing will use Grub, because almost all do) will not get into conflict with the Linux Boot Manager.
Grub "plays well" with Windows, for the most part. But I'm no expert in the area of installing two EFI partitions on a single drive and I might be completely out to lunch.

Right or wrong about that, though, there is a practical reason why I think you should install on the WIN drive rather than the Solus drive. You hardly use Windows at all, as I remember, but you use Solus as your production OS. If you screw something up on the WIN drive, you won't affect your Solus installation, so no harm, no foul.

I don't see any reason why you can't format the new partition on the WIN drive as EXT4, but you might want to check that out.

528491

brent You prefer I do this alongside Solus and not WIN, right? Because of all the Ext formatting? or does it matter?

I have no preference in this regard, but I think this is a good thought:

tomscharbach I would elect would install on the WIN drive. If you install on the WIN drive, Grub (I'm assuming that whatever distros you are installing will use Grub, because almost all do) will not get into conflict with the Linux Boot Manager.
Grub "plays well" with Windows, for the most part. But I'm no expert in the area of installing two EFI partitions on a single drive and I might be completely out to lunch.

The only thing that may speak for the linux drive is that - in my experience - manipulating linux filesystems is less error-prone than windows filesystems. In case of the windows drive you will likely have to resize a large ntfs partition and move another small ntfs partition vs just resizing an ext4 on the linux drive. But this is a highly subjective and not based on facts feeling 😃

brent

tomscharbach thank you tom, that is valuable to me

tomscharbach

brent A last thought, Brent. As I remember, you have a desktop. Why not unplug the Solus drive (either at the drive end of the cable or the motherboard end, so that it is not connected to the motherboard) before you start with the installation process on the WIN drive. That way you can't make a mistake and mess up the Solus drive.

brent

tomscharbach My 'dual boot' went flawless adopting your principle of Separation. One bay/one board slot/one drive at a time. I don't think I'd ever make any hardware moves again without this principle in mind. I plan to unplug drive 1/slot 1 (solus) but I won't do it because I'm scared of mixing up/deleting sda1 with sda2...I'd do it as not to aggravate the nether-world: bios and board hardware. Those two seem much more temperamental with changes🙂 . Thanks for the suggestion, I'm on it.