Hey guys, after 2 years since my last attempt (and recently trying fedora on my laptop) Im ready to try again to install it on my desktop. First time I installed Nobara and it nuked my windows boots partition which caused a lot of trouble and trauma (couldnt boot into windows no matter what). Basically I want to accomplish this:

1- I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).
2- Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

  • bad_news
    31·
    6 hours ago

    As a n00b I’d go Mint, unless you have hardware concerns in which case Fedora is the only option these days (Ubuntu is bad now). I have used Linux since 1996 and would not dualboot in 2025. Microsoft will fuck your shit. Just roll with two boxes.

    • Maiq@lemy.lol
      1·
      4 hours ago

      If you have 2 separate drives each with their own boot loader and you tell your bios to boot from the grub bootloader and grub has successfully detected another OS like windows everything will be fine.

      The trouble with dual booting comes from splitting a drive into partitions with different OS’s on them sharing the same boot partition. Eventually windows will nuke grub and you will loose the ability to boot linux till you use a live USB to repair through chroot and fixing/installing grub manually or using a grub-repair live USB. Usually only gets complicated if you have luks set up.

      I don’t advise dual booting on a single drive. I intentionally buy gaming laptops with dual drive setups and keep the windows drive untouched till the warranty is out. Just in case i have to send it in for repair. Been doing this since 2004 without ever having any bootloader issues that I didn’t cause myself.