Linux Talk | The Dual Boot Deception

greetings and salutations thanks for clicking on the video I sure do appreciate it I happen to notice a couple of days ago that we have passed the 5000 mark as far as subscribers are concerned on this channel and that is amazing to me and I really am humbled and I appreciate it today's video is going to be about dual booting your Linux computer with another operating system and why I don't recommend it and we're going to get into this pretty deeply because I have mentioned this in the past in other videos but I've never really gone into any great detail as to why I just really don't think this is a good idea and this comment is what made me think that I needed to go ahead and do this video it came from Clive Albert Dodd who has been a longtime subscriber and he said that he wanted to talk to me because he wanted me to give him some technical support because he was having trouble with his aboon to installation which is dual booted with Windows 7 and I basically responded that I don't support dual booting Linux with anything I can't guarantee the stability of the system and that is the truth and of course I went back and explained to him in greater detail what the deal was I kind of thought maybe that was a little bit of a flippant answer or short or whatever and might have been construed as me being snooty and it's not that I'm being snooty in any way shape or form it's just that I have a really hard time supporting dual booting you can do with your hardware what you want to from a nerdy point of view I think it's really neat I mean yes you can take a single computer and load multiple operating systems on it and then you can run those operating systems just by selecting which one you want to boot to when the computer boots up unfortunately it is not the most stable environment to be working in and I think the whole dual boot thing comes from the fact that you know Linux is at a disadvantage or has been traditionally for a long long time and that is that if the Linux developers want somebody to use the Linux operating system the first thing that they're going to have to do is install it on their computer and computer nerds find that sort of thing fun we like to install different things on our system and see what happens and put Hardware together but I'd say 98% of all of the people who use computers would never want to do that and would only do it if they absolutely positively had to and the reason why is because traditionally the way it is worked is that you go to the store and you pick up a computer in a box and you bring it home and you turn it on and it has an operating system installed most of the time that's Windows of course if you buy a Macintosh then when it gets home it has Macintosh on the machine you are not asked to install anything you go through a certain setup procedure where you set up your account and give it the information but you don't do that in the world of Linux traditionally if you want to run it you're going to have to install it from scratch and a lot of effort has been made by the Linux developers to make that process easy in some ways they've made it too easy and we'll talk more about that as we roll along here so I do have some visual aids to have up on the screen while we go through this video so the first thing that I want to talk about is the program that makes this possible or usually makes this possible and that's a program called grub grand unified bootloader which is the de facto standard bootloader for Linux distributions across the board there are other boot loaders that you can choose from and some distributions with more advanced installers will actually give you the choice of different boot loaders and it really which one you choose depends on what you're going to do with your machine and that is for advanced users the more you know the more you can make an educated guess as to which one will work for you but if you install a boon - or linux mint or fedora or any of the standard distributions that pretty much come ready to go or Manjaro or something like that and when you boot up the machine it's going to be using grub and grub in what it allows you to do is okay to boot a computer how does this work what do we mean when we say we're booting a computer when you turn the power on on your computer there is a little bias chip in there and bhayya stands for basic input/output system it's the it's the initialization part of the computer and it's the first step to getting the machine going is to initialize all the hardware that you're going to need and that's what that does that doesn't have anything to do with your operating system okay it's just the the little computer programs that actually run the hardware in your computer so when you boot your computer the bias goes through its thing and then it goes to the first hard drive or wherever it finds a bootloader it looks for a bootloader and when it finds one the boot letter bootloader tells the system okay this machine is running Linux or this machine is running Windows or whatever the operating system might be and it initializes the process of loading the essentials of that operating system into memory it's a it's a hand over hand process a lot of detail is available if you're really interested in the boot process of a computer it's quite complicated a lot happens I mean we go from having a machine that's dead and dumb to a machine that comes to life and it becomes pretty much self-aware and each it's all a matter of doing things in the right order and it's a number of steps and the bootloader is a very important part of that the bootloader lives on the boot sector of the first hard drive or wherever the operating system that you're going to run from is installed whether that be a USB stick or a DVD whatever it is when that system sees that bootloader it then goes and starts reading that storage device to get the information it needs and to set up the operating system running in memory all right so the bootloader is extremely important and on any given device you can only have one bootloader so what we do if we were going to install Windows on a system or rather install Linux on a system that already had Windows is we're going to replace the NT bootloader that comes with Windows with grub and then the course will reformat the hard drive and start over boot loaders the grub bootloader has the ability to actually allow you to boot from more than one partition on the drive and so therefore the grub bootloader you can have Windows on here you can have different versions of Linux this is an old shot of the grub bootloader I just found this online and it's a really nice shots because you can see this goes way back it's a kernel to 6:12 for a boon to so how long ago was that and what version of a boom - it was I don't know but it hasn't changed all that much through the years and so when your computer boots up if you have more than one operating system available then you get this screen and then you use the arrow keys to select whatever it is that you want to boot the system into pretty groovy huh all right so exactly how do we get a dual boot system going well a boon to in particular makes it very easy this is the ubiquity installer and this is also the same installer that you'll see with Linux Mint very close to it and pretty much all of like I said the out-of-the-box operating systems use and install it it's very similar to this even the one in Manjaro looks like this the one that I use the last time I played with it so this is kind of the basic template Fedora has a different kind of installer but you'll get to this screen where it will ask you where do you want to put the operating system and in this case on this particular picture you'll see that we are being offered the chance to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 8 obviously the machine that they're using to demonstrate this had Windows 8 already on it now the question that you may ask is what does it actually do so let's go over here and look at the partition partitions on a machine that is running Windows 8 and a boom - now this is a graphic that's taken from a Windows computer and it shows the partitions on the drive we're assuming that you have one hard drive in the machine here so as you can see we have the system drive for Windows or the system recovery partition is the first one and then you'll see that we have the SI partition on the C Drive which is going to be your Windows drive and then we the F Drive there which is I would guess that that's data in this case and then Windows really doesn't know what ext4 is it doesn't read it natively so it knows there's a partition there but it doesn't know what's in it so that's why you'll see these partitions over here toward the right hand side on the bottom graphic on the screen here where it's showing what's in the drive you'll see that Windows just basically says yeah there's a-there partitions here but I don't know what they do so that's what it does is it it will resize the last NTFS partition which is either going to be your home partition for lack of a better term of your data partition in Windows or it's going to be your C partition windows by default doesn't split anything up it just throws it all in the same big happy hard drive so if there's free space available then it's going to cut that free space down and add these new partitions to your disk and this is what it's going to end up looking like and when the computer boots up it's going to ask you which system to go to so the only reason I go through all of that is for anybody who comes across this video who has never done this before if you are a more advanced Linux user you've probably tried a dual boot I think we've all done it I used to do it all the time I don't do it anymore alright looking at the gparted utility pretty much kind of almost the same sort of kind of layout here you'll see that we have the windows system up front which basically this you know this doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you know what system you're looking at in other words you were familiar with it but it'll end up looking something like this and the point of these graphics is just to tell you that you'll see we have lots of partitions on this drive and for EFI drives or the more modern drives it gets even more complicated how that works we're still talking about the old ms-dos system here the the Master Boot Record system of doing drives it has nothing to do with what's new so it gets complicated there is a semi safe way to dual boot your system and that is to just put Linux on its own hard drive and then have Windows on its own hard drive separate from each other and there are two ways that you can do this let's assume that the computer already has windows loaded on it then you can take another hard drive put it in the machine and you can install Linux on that drive and then you can plug your windows drive back in and you can use the boot menu this is from a Dell machine an older boot menu where when you boot the computer you hit f12 on a Dell and it gives you this list or you can change the boot order of the drives in the bias depending on the computer or you can simply swap the cables around until whichever operating system you want to be the standard operating system to boot is the first one in line if you don't understand what I just said now you see how complicated this can get and I actually do have a computer right now one of my machines that has a separate hard drive in it that has Windows 7 loaded on it but it is kind of technically a dual boot system the grub bootloader if you run the update command will go out and find all of the other boot loaders so what it will do getting back to here is that you will see even if your windows partition is on a completely separate Drive it will find it and at boot it will offer to boot it from the system the lovely thing here is though is that nothing that happens to Windows 7 like updating or reloading the bootloader will actually hurt your Linux system or vice versa Linux being reinstalled or updated on that drive is not going to do anything to Windows 7 it's just that the grub program goes out and it sees that there is another operating system on the computer and it gives you the ability to choose that at Buddha and of course this would assume that you're going to make Linux the main system and only boot into Windows when you want to this is a bit difficult to set up I want to talk a little bit more about that as we roll along in the video here as we discuss this in greater detail so setting up a boot a dual boot is super easy it actually is not hard to do you can do it automatically the problems start when you get to a place where you want to make the Machine a single boot system again it gets difficult now we have to get into using partition editors we have to reload the Master Boot Record we have to somehow or another we're going to have to replace the bootloader with the proper bootloader with no reference to the other one so in the case of a if you in the case of a Window System that we installed a boon to on or whatever other operating system it is you you would think okay well I can just go through and remove the windows partitions and then resize all the other ones and it'll work well it's it's not quite that simple and when you start moving partitions around on a hard drive and resizing them this is a red flag anyway because there is always the chance when you do this that you're you could lose your data anytime that you'll do boot dual boot a system you're going to run into the ability you could lose it so if anybody says to me I want to set up dual boot with Linux but it's really important that I don't hose this windows system and I don't have the reinstall media for Windows and I can't get back to where I was blah blah blah blah blah then I tell them don't do it because you there is all is the chance that you're going to trash that window system also Microsoft tends to be very arrogant about the way they update their systems so certain windows updates will automatically rewrite the bootloader and if it does then you end up with a situation where you have a completely and totally useless Linux system that you have no way to get into and the only way to fix that is now you have to go get a live disk and then you have to go in and install grub manually using several commands and it's a bit of a hairy process to do and then you can reconstruct the system where it will boot well for the new user take they're totally lost they have no idea what we're talking about now do we none whatsoever I bet that 75 to 80 percent of the people who are watching this video right now if you've gotten this far do not know what I'm talking about you make be completely lost at this point and if you are this is mine this is my problem with dual booting they make it super easy at the install to to set this up but then if you want to change it or if you have a problem with the system or if you need to reinstall anything then it gets super complicated real fast and finding the information to fix that might be difficult for you you might not understand what you're looking at so what at the beginning was just a click and it's like oh no big deal and oh look at this I can reboot overtime this may cause a problem there's more to this it gets it gets deeper and deeper so let's say that you're willing to take the risk of dual booting your computer and you say I really don't care if I lose this Windows installation I just kind of wanted to have it around that sort of thing we have another issue to deal with so let me switch over here and then we're going to switch over here this is just one of the things that you have to deal with in a dual boot environment and the main one that you have to deal with Linux and Windows do not keep tying the same way and basically what that means is is that on a Windows system if you load your windows on your computer then the claw on your computer is set to local time so it's whatever time it actually is if you live on Eastern Standard Time if you're in the US or you live on Greenwich Mean Time if you're in England or whatever the deal is it's going to set the Machine to the local time Linux on the other hand by default and always has this comes from UNIX sets the hardware clock in your computer to UTC or Universal Time which is Greenwich Time and then to display the clock on your screen until you what time it is what it basically does is it calculates how many hours to plus or minus that and it might not seem like a huge deal but if you have a dual boot between Windows and Linux at the same time and you don't have the time figured out they're going to fight each other it's going to be insane every time that you boot from one operating system to the next it's going to cause a problem so what you have to do if you set up a dual boot and it's not done automatically for whatever reason if you choose the option to just do it automatically from the Ubiquiti installer it will make the change what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to run certain instructions and you come to this page and go way way down here and of course this is all about time servers and NTP and setting things up here there's times here we go this is where it's at and talk about doing this they talk about hacking windows to make windows run on UTC no thank you and then they talk about going in and setting up your Linux system to not be on UTC you need to set it on local time and this is just the beginning of the little things that this can cause I have found just from experience that a dual booted system will not be nearly as stable as one that it's either one or the other and this applies to both operating systems so let's say for instance that you have Windows 7 on one machine and then you have a boon to the latest Ubuntu on it you're running them side side something about switching back and forth between the two I don't know what it is it tends to destabilize both systems they don't work quite as well as they should and in the Linux systems that I've had dual booted I've always come across these really weird little problems that come along that I really can't explain I don't know where they come from and so therefore this is why I say number one I advise people to avoid dual booting and number two I say that as far as through easy Linux I just I'm just not going to support a dual boot because there are so many variables and there's so many crazy things that can happen in that situation that you know it causes extra issues now when I was talking before about using the boot menu or the grub menu to actually switch between two completely separate hard drives I have found that to be a much more stable way of doing it and at one point I had a video up of how to do that but I had to take the video down because a couple while back Microsoft was going crazy going after youtubers who were talking about Windows and because I had Windows graphics in there I actually showed it on a Windows system I was afraid they were going to come after me so I took it down and I've just left it down because I don't the worst thing that I can think of is to have a newbie who doesn't really understand what's going on here to get themselves into this dual boot dual boot thing and then get lost and they don't know what to do and they end up trashing the entire system it is much much much much better gangue much better to go and get yourself a separate physical computer it doesn't have to be the world's greatest computer it could be just some used computer you pick up anywhere as long as it's a core duo and above it will run Linux and take your Linux and install it there and learn how to do it and then when you get really good at it you can you know get rid of your Windows system you can go all Linux you can do it that way I personally like I said I do have one machine that has a Windows hard drivin it it has not been booted on that Windows Drive in months it doesn't that windows install is trashed anyway and I don't think that it's going to be around much longer I probably will either take that drive out or just you know blow the drive off and completely erase it and use it for storage or something on that machine because I've come to a place where I don't use Windows at all and I will never ever ever go back to it I have no desire to ever run Windows in my home again and I know that a lot of people because it happened to me is that you know I've been running Linux continuously one place or another since 2010 and it took me a long long time to get off the Windows merry-go-round I always felt like well I've got to have this around because what if this doesn't work or what if this crashes or whatever and the truth of the matter is is that I sat down one day I got even I think a lot of Windows users think that they're super safe and that they're never going to get a virus on their machine and say oh no I've got the best antivirus and I've got malwarebytes and I'm very careful in blah blah blah blah and it what happened to me was is over a period of about a year or whatever it seemed like every other month I was getting some sort of infection on my computer and I am a very was a very careful Windows user I was pretty hip I mean I have had official Windows training I always thought that I was smarter than the average bear and I was running into these problems and then I'd have to go in and clean out the system and reinstall this and do whatever to get it to work again and it finally got to a point where I said okay that's enough I'm running Linux everywhere else I have this one Windows install I'm going to get rid of it and I did and I haven't looked back and I really don't need it and I think the same thing I really encourage you to I'm not telling anybody to just dump their windows or dump their Mac and go to Linux I'm not like that but what I am saying is is that give Linux a chance in an environment where it can be on its own and you can have it be a completely separate system you're always comparing it when you go back and forth you know you might boot into Windows to play a game and then you get used to how that works and you go back to Linux and if either one of these systems is slightly different on how they perform it may strike you that you may get a very bad impression you may think that Linux is not performing up to par when it actually is and the truth of the matter is it's only acting differently different Hardware reacts differently to different kinds of software some machines run Linux very well some machines don't some machines run Windows very well some machines don't so if you're having the same computer and you're switching back and forth for whatever reason you're constantly in comparison mode and you might find yourself in a situation where you go you start to do something and then you go I'd rather do this with this tool that's available on the other operating system and you constantly are rebooting this machine and switching back and forth it's just not a good conducive environment I think that operating systems work best when they work alone and they work on the same you know do they have their own hardware and it's it's not being rebooted and changed up all the time so that's the reason why I don't support the dual booting I'm not going to through easy Linux what what easy Linux does is I'm going to show you how to install it on your hardware where it's the only thing because once you start putting other things in it and you say you're going to boot dual boot this or you're going to put in extra partitions to do whatever after that you're on your own I don't know what you've done and it's very difficult for me to support that in the field it's it's difficult for me to come along after you've done that and try and figure out what's going on so that's the reason why I say that ordinarily I don't support that at all so anyway I hope this video helped and it really like I said to wrap it up to just the title of the video is dual boot deception it really is a deception because the the Linux developers wanted to make you getting Linux to be very easy so they made the concept of getting the you know your system booted to or rather dual booted you get it all set up to do that they made it super easy it's one click and it's done and then this goes back and does all of this hacking to get the thing to work and then if you want to change any of it it gets very difficult and I think that that's why I call it the dual boot deception because it's like yeah we're going to make it look really easy and then if you want to do anything with it after that boy it gets tough it gets hard for me and I don't cannot tell you how many Linux systems I've set up we don't if you don't do something every day if you're not every day working with a certain software configuration or whatever you don't remember how to do everything with it you have to constantly go look it up and this is where mistakes happen and the next thing you know you're trying to make a simple change to something and you end up trashing the entire computer this is a problem and this is what I say it's not cool to dual boots so thank you very much to everybody who watched the video I hope it helped a little bit and always liked to hear your comments as long as they are constructive and remember that you know just when you make your comments make sure that they aren't too profane and please no grandstanding or flaming here on the comments section and your comment will stick around if not I just delete them check out easy Linux comm be sure to LIKE easy Linux on Facebook I do appreciate that a lot of folks have done that already and also check out freedom penguin comm I think that there will probably be an article that comes along that goes with this video a little bit later on in the week here because I think this is something I actually want to write about too and when I write it it might be a little different so do check out freedom penguin give it a bookmark it's not just because of me it's because there's a lot of people who contribute a lot of great content to freedom penguin I like to skim through there myself and look at the other contributors some folks are pretty smart actually smarter than me so I learned something too thanks for watching we'll talk again soon

Channel: Joe Collins

Views: 116,273

Keywords: GNU/Linux (Operating System), Linux, Windows, Talking, Multi-booting, Computer, Desktop

Id: j9iX2qSfMhE

Length: 29min 3sec (1743 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2015