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Two hard drives and dual boot

R

regnow

Junior Member
I plan to buy a computer with two hard drives. If I install Windows first on the primary hard drive, then Linux second on the primary hard drive, will I be able to access the secondary hard drive for Linux?
 
Yes. There is two ways to do the dual boot.

1) Install windows on the first drive, then install linux on the second drive
When linux is installed it will install a boot manager which will allow you to select between windows or linux

2) Install windows on the first drive. Disconnect the drive
Install linux on the 2nd drive.
Reconnect the first drive and now use your motherboards boot menu options (usually f8 or f12) to select the drive to boot from

Both has pros and cons, personally I like the 2nd option as it keeps all the boot info for each os separate, and if something screws up with windows or linux, its easier to just disconnect the working ok, and not have to worry about where the boot info is while you are fixing the broken os


While the first option is easier to do
 
Ubuntu 14 and maybe earlier versions can read any O.S.: Windows, OSX, and Linux disks. Windows 8 can read and write to ExFat formatted partitions, which both OSX and Linux can also read and write to. So: you may want to keep one partition formatted as ExFat.
Windows can't read OSX HFS disks without a 3rd party software having been installed. OSX can read but can't write to Windows NTFS partitions, without a 3rd party software having been installed. OSX can both read and write to Fat32 formatted disks.
 
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+1 for JackMDS' comment. I have this setup with 4 separate OS drives.
 
The important thing is I want to keep both operating systems on the same hard drive. The computer I want is a laptop that can install two hard drives. I want to install Linux and Windows on a 256 GB SSD drive. Then use a 1 TB hard drive for files for both operating systems. I wonder if this is possible. I know the first operating system I install will have access to both drives but I was wondering if both operating systems can use the 1 TB drive.

Can you use OSX on a PC?
 
regnow said:
The important thing is I want to keep both operating systems on the same hard drive. The computer I want is a laptop that can install two hard drives. I want to install Linux and Windows on a 256 GB SSD drive. Then use a 1 TB hard drive for files for both operating systems. I wonder if this is possible. I know the first operating system I install will have access to both drives but I was wondering if both operating systems can use the 1 TB drive.
Click to expand...

A dual-boot Windows 8.x/Ubuntu 14.x system should both be able to read and write to the 2nd spinning HD.
 
regnow said:
The important thing is I want to keep both operating systems on the same hard drive. The computer I want is a laptop that can install two hard drives. I want to install Linux and Windows on a 256 GB SSD drive. Then use a 1 TB hard drive for files for both operating systems. I wonder if this is possible. I know the first operating system I install will have access to both drives but I was wondering if both operating systems can use the 1 TB drive.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can access the HDD from both Linux and Windows. The trick is to pick a filesystem that both support. Your two choices for Windows compatibility and large volume size are NTFS and exFAT. The Linux exFAT driver is much less mature than the NTFS one, so I would recommend going with NTFS.

One gotcha when using non-UNIX filesystems with Linux is that those filesystems don't fully support the Linux permissions model. That means that they're best used for data only, while executables should be kept on a UNIX native filesystem.
 
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