Linux Lite Forums - How do I dual-boot on separate physical drives?

On an old Asus X71Q (setup3 in sig), which comes with 2 separate physical drives, I would like to dual-boot LL with Windows OS, but not in the conventional way.

In the past, I have dual-booted LL & Win7 on one physical drive (/dev/sda), and linked them to the 2nd physical drive (/dev/sdb), the latter used as a data-only partition. However, this time I would like to install Win7 on the 1st drive and LL on the 2nd, and link both OSes to an external USB drive which I'll use as the data partition.

Before I start, I just want to check if there is anything I should do a bit differently for this less conventional way of dual-booting ... ?

Many thanks as always, for your help

Mike

Hello m654321,

some hdd it can need jumpers moving if it was set as slave for data dump. If you 2nd drive has these it can remind you about that aspect. So as not to think your method failed, when that is only because of the jumper.

Many thanks bitsnpcs, for your reply.

Yes, I remember fiddling around with 'jumpers' on old IDE drives, but our laptops are not that old - all of them use SATA drives (SSDs), and so I haven't had to bother with main/slave settings.
I always enter the BIOS for adjusting the settings for boot priority.

In the end I worked out what do do for setting up a dual-boot system on a dual-drive laptop, where each OS is on a different physical drive, rather than the more common method where both OSes are installed on the same drive and the second drive is used as /home

I will post this as a tutorial in the next week or so and put the link here, and also give my reasons for dual-booting in this way.

Thanks again bitsnpcs, always interesting to read your posts and always a pleasure to read your replies 8)

Cheers
Mike

Hello m654321,

thank you it will be very interesting to read your tutorial and learn about how to do this Smile

My computers it is older ones it is IDE, the new computer it is having SATA III, I don't have any SSD's currently. I think maybe the portable hdd is also not SSD, I hear it move when connected etc.

I am happy you find posts interesting to read, and a pleasure to read replies Smile

, you are very kind.