Dual boot Windows Ubuntu separate drives

Want to use Linux but can’t fully abandon the Windows ship? Here’s how to dual boot on Ubuntu Linux and Windows 10 in your modern machine with two disk drives (C:\ and D:\).

Before you go ahead and tinker with your devices, it is always a good idea to create recovery drives and backups. Here are some of the things that you should consider before doing the next steps.

• Windows 10 recovery drive
  This will be very helpful if something if at some point you cannot boot to Windows. Here’s a guide from Windows.
• Full data backup
  Your important files should be copied to a different storage (external drives or thumb drives or cloud) to avoid data loss if something goes wrong.
• Full disk image
  You can also opt to create a full disk image to help you go back to the same state before you decided to tinker with your device. Macrium is the recommended software over the internet. It’s free but I never used it so use it with caution.

If you have successfully considered and made your backups, we can now proceed with preparing our machines for the dual boot. We’ll have to change some settings in BIOS and in Windows Advanced Power Options.

You can access the BIOS by pressing a key combination during bootup repeatedly. Mine is “F2” but the hotkey depends on the manufacturer of your PC.

• Disable Secure boot
• Disable Intel Rapid Start (if available)
• Disable Fast boot

Windows Fast boot (Fast Startup) is different from the BIOS Fast boot option. This too should be disabled to avoid problems during bootup. You can access this option in Advanced Power Options in Windows 8/10. Here’s a guide on how to disable it.

If so happens you cannot see the Fast Startup option and wanted to make sure that it is off, you can disable the hibernate file via Command Prompt. This will subsequently disable Fast Startup as it uses the same hibernate file for its operations. To do this,

Then type the following:

These are all the platform preparation pre-requisites that you need if you are to use the entire second hard disk (D:\) for Ubuntu. However, if you are planning to put it in a partition on the second driver (D:\), you need to perform additional steps below.

We need to prepare the partition first before running the installation. We must shrink and create an unallocated space on the second drive for our partition. To do this,

You can put your desired “Shrink space” in the next window that will appear.

If for some reason you cannot shrink the disk space further, you need to do a disk defragmentation first before doing the shrinking. I highly recommend to use either Defraggler or PerfectDisk for this task instead of the default built in Windows defragmenter.

After defragmenting the system files found in the second disk drive (boot-up defrag) together with defraging non-system files, you can now proceed to shrink the free space in the second disk drive.

Now its time to prepare the installation media that we are going to use to install Ubuntu. To do this you need the following:

• Minimum 8GB thumb drive with 8GB unused space or more
• Ubuntu ISO
• Rufus or any other bootable media creator

We’ll be using Rufus to create the bootable media. To do this,

This will create the bootable media in your thumb drive using the ISO provided. For reference here is what I used in my thumb drive.

This can be achieved by changing the boot order in your machine’s BIOS. This differs per manufacturer to its best consult your product manual on how to do this.

Follow on screen instructions to install Ubuntu. If you want to put Ubuntu in a partition on the second disk drive, best create your own partitions just like below.

Otherwise, you can use the whole second disk drive for Ubuntu installation.

In my case, I partitioned the second disk drive to two since I plan to put Ubuntu on and it functions as my data repository. Using the Ubuntu setup partition tool, I divided my second hard disk as follows:

Install the Grub bootloaded to /sda/ (not /sda1/ or /sda2/). Installing in /sda/ will avoid overwriting the default Windows bootloader located in the first disk drive.

Don’t worry about putting the bootloader in the second hard disk. Grub bootloader is intelligent enough to pick up other resident OS so you won’t have any problems booting to Windows afterwards

And last but not the least, finish installing Ubuntu. Afterwards you can reboot and you will be greeted by Grub bootloader with entries automatically populated to include your Windows 10 installation.

Cheers!