So that when I turn on the machine, I am presented with an option to start up either Windows or Ubuntu. I don’t want to have to go into the BIOS menu and fiddle with boot priorities every time I want to select an OS.
So to be clear, what I want is, when I turn on/restart the PC, it comes up with a prompt saying something like “Please select an operating system” and then there are 2 options to choose from.
Is this possible?
I have 2 SSDs and would prefer to have each OS on it’s own SSD.
I don’t have anything on the SSDs that I need to keep and would prefer to start fresh.
Edit: I have the Windows ISO and the Ubuntu ISO on separate USBs. My motherboard is the Asus ROG 10th Anniversary Rampage edition.
I installed Linux Mint (Ubuntu derivative) on my MacBook Air and it asked if I wanted to install Linux as well as keeping OSX. I said yes and I now have a boot menu that lets me pick OSX or Mint. The boot menu is quite spiffy (the menu is called “ReFind”), it’s graphical and also lets me boot from any USB sticks if present without going into any EFI setup screen.
So my plan of attack for your case would be to install windows first, then ubuntu and see if the dual-boot that’s part of ubuntus installer works for you.
^This. Especially true of older Windows versions, which were notoriously all-elbows about other OSs pre-installed on the hard drive. Linux distros are coded to gracefully install as a second bootable OS, whereas Microsoft has not been so accommodating. (Can’t say whether this is still true for Windows 10, but as late as Windows 8.1 you definitely had to install Linux 2nd, because Windows was completely honey-badger on the hard drive.)
This turned out to be super easy to do. I deleted all partitions on both my SSDs, then installed Windows on one of them, then ran the Ubuntu installer and said to install Ubuntu alongside Windows. It didn’t even ask me to select a disk or create a partition so I was worried that it would install it on the same disk as Windows, but it seems to be smart enough to notice I had 1 unused disk and just installed it there.
Weirdly, Windows does not recognize a wifi adapter (no option to connect to a wifi network), but Ubuntu has no problems with wifi.
I have run dual-boot systems for years, and generally speaking, dual booting Windows and Linux is usually fairly easy. The only tricks to it are to always install Windows first since Microsoft does not play nice with the other children, and always leave the disk space where you want Linux to go unpartitioned and unformatted by Windows.
I forget exactly where they are during the install process for Ubuntu, but there are options you can set for where you want Ubuntu to install. By default, it’s not going to install over your Windows installation or over another Linux installation. But if you wanted to do something fancy like only allocate half of that disk to Ubuntu, you could have changed it during the installation process. You must have clicked past the options and installed it to the default location that it chose.
Huh. Usually it’s the other way around.
Some wifi chip makers refuse to release the specs for their chips without a non-disclosure agreement, and NDAs go against the Linux open way of doing things. It’s not that uncommon for a wifi adapter to work in Windows and not in Linux.
Yours is the first case I’ve heard of where it’s the other way around.
