New Computer, want to dual boot

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Got an alienware desktop, henceforth known as the cylon as it looks like one.

Its been known, that if you are faint of heard about touching your partition table, do not touch your partition table. Previously when I have installed mostly ubuntu distro’s , when the option has come up I have elected to go with nuke and pave and run a pure linux box.

Now the aughts have called me and I am thinking of going back to running a dual boot with windows 10 and latest ubuntu. So image downloaded and got to the part where I decide where to put the distro, and go screaming like a little girl. Decided to go with a secondary plan and downloaded virtualbox and run buntu as VDI, which I don’t like. I normally would like the host computer to be linux, with the guest OS being what ever.

What I would like to do, is to take the hard drive out of the dinosaur and put it into cylon. Its currently running Ubuntu 16.04, so after a short stint at googling if its possible, I decided to ask here. One can it be done, and if so, how does it get added to the grub.

In short transplant a hard drive into a free bay on cylon and have it show up on start up, instead of going straight to windows.

2

Maybe I’m missing something, but why can’t you simply add the drive to your PC, and set your BIOS to prompt you for which drive to boot from?

In my PC I have a drive with the latest windows 10, another with Windows 7, and another with Ubuntu. My BIOS is set to default to Win10 if I don’t intervene, but I can tap a key during startup and then boot from any of the three. Works every time, without messing with dual boot schemes.

3

What’s the issue with shrinking a partition to make room for Linux partitions?

I’ve done all sorts of stuff like this, no problem. Easus Partition Master, Minitool Partition Wizard, etc. are all suitable for this.

For me, the headache is always configuring the boot loader. LILO was awful enough but GRUB was designed by certifiably insane people. I use the Windows boot loader. There’s YouTube videos, etc., showing how to configure it to add a Linux boot option.