Dual Boot Workaround Tutorial [Physical Work Involved]

Issues & Assistance Newbies
1

Hello everyone I am new to the Linux Desktop World and the Garuda forum.

Today I wanna bring you a tutorial on how you can have both windows and Linux on your system without having any concern of Windows updates breaking your Garuda + GRUB system.

Background Notes:

Since I have been looking at threads on the forum and I see no one has mentioned this as far as I can see and I also have seen people mentioning that Windows can break things on windows updates when you have dual boot with Garuda + GRUB.
And of course I can`t forget to mention that Garuda does not support dual boot.

Just wanted to bring this idea/workaround to the light on this forum so people can be aware that this is also an option you can do if you are into doing the little extra physical work for doing this.

My Scenario here is:

I have 1 SSD and 3 HDDs.

Lets say I wanted to play games like Destiny 2, FiveM(Multiplayer mod) for GTA V or even use any windows only software.

Here is the small tutorial for how to do it:

Requirements:

At least 2 drives SSD or HDD.

(But if you want both Windows and Garuda to be faster I would recommend 2xSSDs of course.)

  1. Install Garuda on your SSD or HDD and unplug your second drive from your system.

Then

  1. Setup your Garuda to your likings and turn off your computer.

Then

  1. Unplug your Garuda Drive and plug in the empty drive you did not plug in at step 2.

NOTE:

If you have multiple drives that you are gonna use with Garuda I would recommend to remove those before the next step.

Then

  1. Install Windows as normal with having step 3. done.

  2. Congratulations you now have a pc with both Windows and Garuda.

AFTER INSTALL REMINDER:

So when you wanna launch into say Garuda you would remove your ALL Windows drives from your system or if you wanna launch Windows you remove ALL Garuda related drives from your system.

REMINDER FOR DESKTOP USERS:
For desktop users with easily accessible drives in your case do tag your Windows or Garuda drive with something so you can tell the drives apart in your case so you don't end up doing any mistakes in the near future. (Same with Laptop users but see LAPTOP USER NOTE)

LAPTOP USER NOTE:
If you have a laptop that you can easily open up to access your drive there is no extra steps beside opening up your Laptop every time you wanna change the OS of course.
If you have an laptop that is hard to open up I would recommend not to do it.

END NOTE:
This way windows updates wont break anything, I know this is a more painful way of doing it but its better than being concerned over your windows updates breaking your whole system!

I hope this will help you and if you have any questions or wanna add to this please do!

Thank you for reading.

Kind Regards
TimRambo

2

Welcome :grinning:

IIRC @tbg has been doing it that way for decades, with a removable frame.
I had built a pallet of toggle switches into the case back in the 80s or 90s and used them to cut the power to the individual hard drives.
Today I have M$ and Garuda on a Nvme in the laptops and no problems with it and if there is still chroot :slight_smile:
These things are not supported by Garuda Linux​:innocent::sunglasses::grin:

6 Likes
3

Quite right, I started the same way long ago wiring in interuptable power switches to each hard drive. Nowadays that is totally unnecessary as SSD hot swap racks (such as IcyDock), support up to 6 SSD drives in one drive bay. The surest way to avoid problems running more than one OS is to ensure that each drive is physically isolated and cannot be seen by the other OS’s.

2 Likes
4

Thank you! :grinning:

1 Like
5

Wow, I did not think of having power switches in my case for the drives at all, sounds really interesting way of doing it.