So I have a Delma and the internet is giving me an overwhelming range of answers so I’ve come here for some clarity.
I am building a new desktop I want to run Linux as my daily driver for work/education but I also want to have a windows install so I can game on all the big titles with friends.
My Research has led me to the conclusion that I don’t want to deal with the headaches of true dual booting ( 2 os on same drive with partitions and 2 boot loaders ) I also don’t want to deal with all the headaches running A VM Can caus with some of the mainstream games And I am not confident enough in my Linux knowledge to always be able to fix these.
Ideally what I would like to do is just have multiple hard drives in my system with Linux environment and all my daily driver needs and a separate drive with a slimmed down windows install solely used for gaming. And ideally a 3rd drive solely for storage that is accessible from both operating systems.
So I have just come here to ask what is the best way to accomplish this and if a simple solution such as outlined above is possible or if I will run into any issues sharing recourses.
I have not. I’ve been hoping I can just find a way to boot into the drives separately via bios without running into any issue with system resource allocation ( not even sure this is an issue ) im just trying to avoid any hardware issues that may come up from constantly switching drives and subsequently switching os when I need to work vs game…I was hoping I could just have a drive per os and reboot into that drive when my needs change and not suffer any major issues
One drive to boot Linux from, one drive to boot windows from, and one (or more) data drives sounds fine. The main consideration is when you are installing an operating system is to only have the one drive plugged in. This prevents overwriting the wrong drive that has data on it, and it also prevents the bootloader from being installed on the wrong drive.
The main issue with having Linux and Windows on the same drive is that they tend to overwrite each other’s bootloaders, and it can be a pain to re-add them. But with a dedicated drive this is not really and issue.
For a shared drive, it should probably be formatted NTFS. Fat based file systems are not really ideal for internal drives, and drives for Linux file systems are not really ready for production on windows (ext, btrfs, xfs, etc).
My personal suggestion:
a SSD to boot Linux from
a SSD to boot Windows from
a dedicated hard drive (or SSD if you have that much budget) for Windows games
a hard drive that is accessible on both
a hard drive for your linux home (that way you can wipe and re-install your boot SSD without having to wipe your home)
If you get a big enough HDD, then 3,4 and 5 could all be partitions one drive. Or they could be seperate drives.
Thank you for the advice. My plan so far is to use an older windows drive from my old desk top with windows 10 and all of my files on it already to set up the new build Then install a new NvME ssd with Linux on it. And then install 1 or 2 empty drives for excess storage as needed. I’m glad to hear this should be fairly simplistic.
I currently have
A WD 1TB drive ( old windows drive)
A brand new clean WD 1tb drive.
A 8TB Seagate drive that was used to back up files from old windows pc and 2 laptops running windows
And I’m planning on adding a new NVME ssd at either 500 or 1tb
Also for what its worth in the future when my budget allows i plan on pulling all of the spinning drives out of this machine and converting my old box to a NAS with my older spinning drives and only having 2 1tb nvme ssd in my new build