How to Dualboot and Multiboot Linux (and Windows)

hello youtube it's dory and thanks for tuning in to dot slash this video is about dual booting and multi-booting now they're pretty much the same in terms of how to install additional operating systems so i'm going to cover installing several operating systems as well as the differences between using it on a uefi system versus a traditional older or i guess legacy bios system so let's get started so the very first thing you're going to want to know how to do you're going to have to consult your system or motherboard manual or laptop whatever you're using in order to find out two keys that you need to know so i'm just rebooting here the first thing you're going to need to know is which key to press in order to access the boot menu on my system it is f11 so you can see here i only have one operating system installed so it's showing ubuntu and then the other key is my delete key is to get into the actual bios motherboard setup so for me it's the delete key so just keep mashing whatever key it is in order to get it to work and then in here again you're gonna have to consult your manual but for me uh just go over into the boot section set the drive priorities and again because there's only one system right now there will be more later it's only showing ubuntu so once you know those two things we can get started now installed ubuntu 20.10 just as a demonstration in order to get something on my system and most people want to install ubuntu so i figured this is a good way to start now if you're adding linux to a windows system there's a couple of things you're gonna have to do first this is a dell xps laptop which is why the resolution is a little different because it's 6x10 but anyways you're going to hit start and just type in power and you want to find power and sleep settings and then over on the right additional power settings and then click on choose what closing the lid does and then over here you can see fast startup you're gonna have to turn that off so change settings that are currently unavailable you have to click this and now you can disable this this will allow linux to read the windows partition another thing you're going to want to make sure of is that you're shrinking the right partition so if you look at your your windows drive the largest drive this is a 400 gig drive on this system is the one you're going to want to shrink in order to make room for ubuntu that's if you're doing it manually these other partitions are tools and junk that windows and dell installs and you're not going to want to touch those just leave them there so now back to linux if you're installing ubuntu as a second system or others that use the same installer you're gonna have something like install alongside now you can see in ubuntu here it has this little slider so you can dictate how much room you want ubuntu to take and how much you want to shrink your existing partition you can also erase the disk completely and install the distro taking the entire disk or you can choose something else and do it manually now my preferred method and this is something that you don't have to do but i just find this is a better way of setting things up in advance is to use g parted most distributions no matter what you're using if you're using a live iso you can still install software in it so here this is actually installed on the disk however on a live iso if it's not installed you can install it now you can see here this is a very basic setup it's just the efi partition and the root partition now the efi partition is where all your things are going to be installed into that the computer is going to look at when it boots up so this is where your boot loaders are going to be this is where your various grub loaders are going to live and yes you can have more than one which is why i wanted you to know how to get to your boot menu and how to get into the bios to change your settings if you don't have a uefi system and you just have a regular bios system then you're not going to have this efi system partition you'll probably only have one large partition and maybe a swap partition because grub will be installed into the drive itself it's an mbr install it's it's a different way of doing it than uefi but you can only have one bootloader again i'm demonstrating this on uefi so i'm just gonna mention the bios systems as i go along now one thing i highly recommend you do is to download the gparted live iso copy it to a usb stick and then boot from that because you can't modify a partition if your system is using it so i'm gonna do that right now i put in the usb stick with g parted live on it and if you're interested i have another video on gparted and how to how to use it to also recover any errors that you have any systems that won't boot it's actually very useful and i i will recommend again just like in the video to have a usb stick just label it g-parted live and just have it nearby just in case you have any issues starting your system so we're gonna start it up now this is the live usb just gonna hit enter and again like i said in the other video just accept all the defaults unless you use a different language for your keyboard or different language for the os itself it's like i said don't touch keymap english just all the defaults works so now here we are loaded up at the desktop and it's literally just g parted you have a terminal and a basic web browser but this is my preferred way of setting up multiple distros in a multi-boot environment because you can plan ahead and do all your resizing and everything ahead of time and you can even name your partitions and i'm gonna do that right now so let's shrink down this ubuntu partition to say about 20 gigs i'm not gonna mess with it that much okay and let's name it and also label and then let's create a new one and we're going to go with a 25 gig partition and i'm going to install manjaro so i can label it and name it right away add ok apply now it's going to shrink the ubuntu partition so if there's any data that's spread throughout the disk it's going to move it all to the space you've allocated it and it's going to create the new partition so now for me of course i'd be a little more realistic when i'm doing this and what kind of drive size that i would want to use i'm i'm not going to give only 25 gigs to a distro unless i'm just testing it out but if it's something i might use i'm going to give it enough space to you know install games and whatever software that i want and you know load my documents into it so it's totally up to you what you want to do but remember to plan ahead because moving a partition takes time because it has to move everything over what you could also do is put the partition in the middle and leave some space in between that way you can expand the ubuntu partition to take up that available space or you can even add one in between totally up to you how you want to do it just remember don't get stuck by your partition layout like for me here if there was a chance that i might continue to use ubuntu i would give it more than 20 gigs but this is just for this video so now it's all done we can close and there's something you're going to want to take note of here before you install your next operating system one thing is your uefi system partition write it down on a notepad or take a picture with your phone just so you know what the device is so for me it's sda1 if you have uh an nvme ssd it'll be nvme p n one whatever whatever it is just write down what the slash dev slash device name and partition is that way when you're installing in manjaro you know for sure that you're installing it on the right partition because you're going to want to give the operating system where your efi partition is as well as where you want the operating system installed so in this case sda1 will be the efi partition and sda3 will be where the actual operating system is installed so now we're actually done here for now you could go further and if you know you're going to install many other operating systems like i am i can go ahead and just add more obviously make sure the file system is ext4 which is what linux uses so just go ahead and add whatever extra partitions you want for your other operating systems so now in a bios system it would be pretty much the same but without the fat32 efi partition at the very beginning another thing you may want to add especially if you only have four or eight gigs of ram is a swap partition my system here has 16 gigs of ram so i normally wouldn't add a swap partition but you can and to do that i suggest putting it at the very end of the drive so again just right click new and you can move move it this way and make it whatever size you want so let's say eight gigs and change the file system to linux swap add ok apply so now you can add it at the beginning you can add it wherever you want but when you have it somewhere in the middle here it can get in the way you might want to might have to delete it and then move it what not i just got into the habit on some systems to put it at the very end that way you can resize and move your partitions all you want and this will never get in the way so now we're ready to install i can go ahead and shut this down i'm going to take the g parted live usb stick out and i'm going to put the manjaro usb stick in and we'll go from there and install manjaro okay so now i'm booting up again with manjaro usb plugged in and i've got my boot menu here so just select the flash drive with uefi boot in and if you're using an nvidia graphics card you might want to change this to non-free it doesn't really matter for me because i'm using amd so i'm going to boot into this all right so we're in monjaro and the redshift or night mode or whatever is obviously turned on so let's turn that off so now it doesn't matter which distro you're installing as your second one just find the installer and fire it up and then we're just gonna go through and set things up so this is where it's going to be really handy that we set up our partitions ahead of time because they're already done for you you can do install alongside that's fine and then if you haven't done this you would select your partition and then resize it like this however that's not what i'm going to do so at this point i'm going to select manual partitioning and they're all pretty similar in how they're set up you're basically going to select your fat32 efi partition edit it or maybe there's a button that says change and make sure here the content you say keep because you don't want it to wipe it out you want to add the manjaro bootloader into the existing partition alongside the ubuntu one and now for the mount point you're gonna pick slash boot slash efi okay you might have to type it in depending on the installer and then here this is why i said write down where you want to install that's the ubuntu partition but this is the empty manjaro partition we created so we're going to edit that here you can keep the contents because there's nothing in it it's blank and for the mount point we're going to slash which is just root so that's all you really have to do some distros might have a drop down box asking you where to install the bootloader and here again you would select slash dev sda1 or whatever your efi partition is since we didn't set anything for the other partitions it's going to leave them alone and it's just going to install manjaro into sda3 so hit next and create your user and finish whatever tasks you have to do in the installer to finish it up so now we're almost done it's at the part where it's installing the bootloader and i just wanted to mention one thing is that when it's installing the bootloader it will detect your other operating systems your other distros and it will add them to the grub menu so when we reboot and we boot with the manjaro bootloader it will have ubuntu ubuntu will not but we'll go through that and fix that so if you do want to use the ubuntu bootloader you can so now we're all done i'm gonna hit done and i usually don't reboot i will power off completely remove the usb stick and then power up again so now we're booting up back into ubuntu you'll notice there's no option for manjaro but that is because ubuntu is the current bootloader selected by the motherboard sometimes on some machines when you install an additional distro that one becomes the default but it's not always the case i'm not sure exactly why i'm not an expert in uefi but it happens you'll notice there was no option to boot into manjaro that's because ubuntu's bootloader ubuntu's grub doesn't know that manjaro exists we need to update it now depending on what distro you installed first there's different ways of doing it so just do a web search for how to update the bootloader for your specific distribution but for ubuntu and most debian based distros it is sudo update grub so you can see here it's going to update the bootloader and it found manjaro on partition sda3 and it added the boot menu entry so now if we go ahead and restart the computer because there's more than one option now other than ubuntu we will now be presented with the different distributions that the bootloader has discovered so now here we go if you don't hit any keys it's going to just boot into ubuntu but now you can see manjaro is also an option but now remember this is ubuntu's bootloader there are some distros that you may need to use its own bootloader in order for a distro to actually boot up successfully such as um i think silver blue is very picky and also if you use something with btrfs like if you have opensuse with btrfs you're going to want to use opensuse's bootloader because it is configured to use butterfs whereas ubuntu's bootloader or another distro's bootloader wouldn't know how to how it's set up with all the sub volumes and everything and it won't boot properly so i'll go ahead and try to fire up manjaro and it's been sitting for a while at the screen which means it is not going to boot this is one of those scenarios where manjaro is just being picky about how it's loaded so i'm going to force the computer off and then we're going to change the boot loader to manjaro's boot loader here you can do a test at first and you can hit your boot menu key that you use the same key to boot off of the usb stick it will also show you the different boot loaders on that efi partition so we have ubuntu and manjaro which are installed on the efi partition now whichever one you pick here is only temporary for this boot so i'll go ahead and pick manjaro because we can just do like a little test run here hit enter and another thing you notice is manjaro is the default so if you don't hit any keys manjar will boot up because this is manjaro's bootloader but you can still choose ubuntu so i'm going to go ahead and boot up manjaro and here we are log in so now we have two distros running so we can go ahead and show you something else here in most distros you can do a efi boot mgr and it will show you what options are available for efi there are other things you could do here like deleting things and changing the order but we're just going to leave it as is and in case you're wondering where these are remember we mounted it in boot efi i need the password to get in efi now you can see ubuntu and manjaro's folders are in here and they're proper boot loaders so now we can do a little test here i'm going to restart now this time i'm mashing the delete key because i want to go into the bios i'm going to change what boots up first so i'm going to go down to my priorities change this to manjaro so now first thing it's going to boot is manjaro's bootloader instead of ubuntu's and i'm going to save reboot so now it's going to pick manjaro's bootloader by default and i want to test to make sure ubuntu works so here boot loader's up i'm going to choose ubuntu try and boot it up it should work ubuntu is not super picky if it's not loading from its own bootloader and here we go we're in it's booted everything's everything seems to be working and now you have a system that is dual boot one thing i of course forgot to mention during the manjaro installation if you don't have a uefi system and you just have an older bios system it's going to install the bootloader into the master boot record of your hard drive so when you reboot it's going to be the manjaro bootloader it'll always be the last one that was installed you can't have multiple ones so whichever distro you install last that's the bootloader that's going to be running so in this case it's actually a good thing ubuntu was installed first because manjaro won't boot with the ubuntu bootloader so installing manjaro last would have been a must so that you can use ubuntu and manjaro so last thing before i wrap it up i'm going to kind of skip through the majority of the install here but i'm going to install fedora now as i'm booting into fedora here there's one important thing that i forgot to mention and that is distros based on other distros it's a huge annoyance of mine and i really wish people would fix this because it's just a matter of changing the boot loader but if i install okay like i have ubuntu installed now if i install another distro that's similar like um i'm not sure about mint i know for sure elementary if i install elementary after installing ubuntu it calls the bootloader ubuntu for some reason it's not only elementary either but for some reason they couldn't be bothered to change the bootloader name so on some of my systems i've noticed you'll have two that are named the same but the majority of the time it just overwrites the original one so if you want to dual boot ubuntu and elementary whichever one is installed last that's going to be the bootloader even in uefi so if i would have installed if i were to install elementary right now it will overwrite ubuntu's bootloader so ubuntu's bootloader will no longer be available because if i choose ubuntu it's actually elementary and elementary will be the default to boot up so several distros are like that and i find it kind of lazy to not simply change what it's called and i wish so much that they would so if any devs are listening please make it happen so here's fedora's bootloader which is a little different you see the default is automatic partitioning selected i don't really know what it's going to do automatically here so you can do custom and advanced custom we'll choose custom here and i'll show you what it's like it's a little confusing because the way that it lays it out is a little bit funny it's not like any of the other installers so i mean i'm sure it makes sense but like you could see ubuntu is here on sda2 with the boot efi and sda1 and then unknown linux which is manjaro on sda3 and then sda4 unknown but like it what is it planning to do i can tell it to do this but what's going on up here i think this is this is part of this it's a little bit confusing so i just stay out of this one so we'll select advanced custom here and then just hit done and it'll take you to the advanced custom editor and here you can see it's a little bit more traditional you can see the partitions here and just laid out like a list it's just way easier so here we have efi partition which we're going to change this is the edit selected device set mount point and here we're going to boot efi now i know in the others it's capital efi but it will give you an error for fedora if you don't make it lower case so set mount point that's set fedora you see we labeled it sda4 set mount point just put it root and also in this one you can you can resize them and everything if you want to or format them but we don't have to because i set this up ahead of time because i had a plan so now that's done and our swap will automatically be detected i believe you don't have to tell it it's swap it can figure it out and then our other partitions will be left alone hit done now because you've set the slash boot slash efi it will automatically install the bootloader there so i'm getting an error click for details you must create a new file system on the root device okay so let's uh format it then so format ext4 all fedora slash format so it wants you to format it so we'll do that done and it'll confirm destroy sda4 and then create a new one accept changes so i'm not sure why it's super picky you must format the partition for some reason so anyways that is done begin installation and then it should be good to go alright so fedora is finished installing so i'm going to go ahead and start it up and try to load up the fedora boot loader and as you can see i have manjaro ubuntu and fedora for some reason fedora is there twice but as long as it works i'm happy and you can see it also detected ubuntu and manjaro so go ahead and fire up fedora and it booted up and we're at the setup so that's good enough for me i'm going to go ahead and just for kicks try manjaro with the fedora bootloader fedora bootloader try manjaro so fedora's bootloader didn't work to load manjaro but i can use manjaro's it just doesn't have fedora as an option so we just have to update grub in manjaro so manjaro being based on arch this is how you update grub this command here on the screen and it's the same for all arch based distros so you can see it found it loaded itself as well as ubuntu and fedora which means fedora is now an option in the manjaro bootloader so because i've set manjaro to be the bootloader in the bios or motherboard setting uefi configuration it will always load the manjaro bootloader but since it is aware of all the other distros it's fine i can now select fedora the hitch here being that if you were to have manjaro and let's say opensuse with butter fs or something else two distros that require their own bootloader you might be having to use your boot select every time you boot up to select which boot loader you want to load so it's just a button you have to press in order to switch distros not a huge deal but best thing you can do is find which bootloader works the best in order to load all your distros in this case it's manjaro's simply because manjaro won't boot if you use another distro's bootloader so i hope you found this useful i know when you're like me and you do a lot of distro hopping um i have my main distro and then i have several other distros i think i only have four or five running right now maybe four but i used to have windows 10 and nine distros running on two different drives in my laptop so you can have as many as you want there's no real limit the one thing i'll say is the efi partition it might get full so that's something you might want to keep an eye on i mean the boot loaders are very small i usually do a one gig efi partition but it it's not a huge deal unless you fill it up and if you do then you have to just go in and start removing some of the old boot loaders that you don't use anymore or just decide on which one you want to use and get rid of the others i'm happy to be able to do this video now because prior to this my testing machine that i record here scrappy i called it was an old bios motherboard with some parts ahead lying around i've now upgraded it to a ryzen system it's actually the guts from my production machine went into my testing machine so now i can do uefi stuff which is fantastic and i've upgraded my production machine to a new ryzen 7 3800x so better better video editing quicker render times and saving me some time here so give it a try and remember to always back up all your partitions back up your data back up your efi partition as well because if you mess it up you can restore that time shift is great for that i have a video on that as well so if you like this video and you found it handy and it helped you get onto some distro hopping multi-booting adventure give this video a like don't forget to subscribe and share this video on your social media and if you'd like to contribute to my channel and help me contribute to the community head on over to patreon.com dorian dot slash thank you so much for watching and until next time bashan you

Channel: DorianDotSlash

Views: 230,814

Keywords: linux, grub, grub2, dual booting, dualbooting, multi booting, multibooting, windows, windows 10, UEFI, GPT, MBR, BIOS, dualboot, dual boot, multiboot, multi boot, how to dual boot, dual boot windows 10 and ubuntu, operating system, dual boot linux, dual boot windows 10 and linux, dual boot windows, install ubuntu alongside windows 10, how to dual boot windows 10 and ubuntu, dual boot linux and windows 10, dual booting windows 10 and ubuntu, duelboot, duel boot

Id: Crleyglb4mo

Length: 29min 5sec (1745 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020