Two Hard Drives, Two Operating Systems. Suggestions.

[Dogsthumb]

I bought a g750jw-db71 and am loving it. I have purchased a second hard drive and wish to take advantage of the second hard drive bay. I want to have, as the title stated, two hard drives and two different operating systems.

I would like to have instructions just to ease my mind. From what I have gathered it is as simple as removing my old hard drive and placing my new hard drive in the first hard drive bay. Install Linux and place it back into the second slot. Then replace my old hard drive and enjoy two different operating systems by switching which boots first in the BIOS. (i have disabled secure boot)

My fear is that I will mess something up on the old hard drive or the BIOS.

Note: I do not wish to ghost anything or move files from my old hard drive. I am also not interested in dual booting on the same hard drive. I plan on using my second hard drive for learning Linux and I plan on messing that partition up through the wonderful process of learning.

Thank you for any help you give.

Edit: I have also read something about how UEFI requires GPT. If I format the disk using GPT will this cause any problems with Linux?

[Prostar_Compute]

Hey,

You've pretty much got it down. You might not need to remove the other drive while installing, but it will certainly circumvent confusion when loading Linux and partitioning.

And yes: UEFI utilizes GPT. Current Linux distros (most of them) support GPT disks, so unless you're using a distro that has not caught up, there shouldn't be any problems! By the way, I think/hope you will like Linux. There is definitely a learning curve after using another OS for years, but it's a great alternative.

[Dogsthumb]

Thank you for the feedback. This is the first system I've owned that uses UEFI. I am having to learn about it on my own and just making sure I get all the facts.

[Dogsthumb]

Well. I removed my old hard drive and installed my new hard drive. Booted Ubuntu 12.04.3 live disk. Opened Gpart and made the disk GPT. Then clicked "install Ubuntu" and made a 100g partition using ext4 and set "/" as root. Made 2g of swap and a 2MB for BIOS. I just followed the suggestions in the prompt as I went along. Some were probably wrong or not necessary.

After a successful installation, it asked me to restart. (removed the live disk at this point.) Once the system started up it could not find anything useful. No biggie probably just boot priority. Went into BIOS and the only option in boot priority is to delete my dvd drive from list. It doesn't recognize that there is even a hard drive in there anymore. This is OK because I didn't expect this to work the first time. That is why I'm doing this, to learn.

So if anyone has some suggestions or insight in why this might have failed I would appreciate it. Thanks.
Also: placing the old hard drive back in caused no problems and it booted the first time. That is how I'm typing this.

[nvan7891]

I am trying to figure out exactly how to do this as we speak. I put my old 1tb hdd/ssd hybrid with my ubuntu installation from my old laptop on it in the second bay. Windows 8 recognizes the NTFS storage partition on it. I plan on cloning it to a 1tb external, formatting it, re-installing ubuntu, and cloning the /home, and NTFS storage partition back over.

Although, I just thought of another idea. Would re-sizing the windows 8 partition on the original ssd and adding a partition(s) to install ubuntu to (either just the system, or partitions for system and home), and then using the second hdd/ssd hybrid drive for storage (or half storage, half /home for ubuntu) be a better idea? Thus having the two OS on the primary ssd, and using the secondary one for common storage, possibly the /home partition etc.

If I go ahead and try either I'll report back. This UEFI business is new to me, so I'm kinda learning as I go. I just went from a nearly 10 year old dell inspiron 1520 I had upgraded as much as possible, to this G750JW. I gotta say I'm impressed, this is a pretty sweet machine.

[Liartar]

Here is the situation I have now, I am trying to resolve it for several days. Maybe this information would be of any use to you and perhaps you would have any suggestions to my problem.

I have tried dual-boot on G75WV on separate hard drives. I haven't done as you said and I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on the second HDD with primary disk not removed. So basically, I loaded into Ubuntu live, I created partitions for Ubuntu on secord hard drive (/boot, /, /home, and exchange fat32 partition), then I installed Ubuntu on to this second disk.

If I remove second HDD, Windows 7 loads fine from the first drive. Like nothing is wrong.

If I insert second HDD and try to load Windows (I set Windows Boot Loader as the 1st boot option in BIOS), it doesn't load. Instead, it shows loading screen for a split-second, and then says "Windows is loading files" and loads Grub from the second HDD. From Grub I cannot load Windows. I think there is some drive mapping problem between Grub, UEFI and Windows. I can load Ubuntu though, so this is fine.

Now I am trying to understand why Windows passes on to Grub instead of loading itself. If I can understand that I can just use Windows Boot Loader to boot Ubuntu.

[gdubc]

Did you try reinstalling windows with just the hdd it will be installed on connected? Sounds like windows thinks it needs something off that other drive and maybe a reinstall would fix.

[Liartar]

gdubc wrote:
Did you try reinstalling windows with just the hdd it will be installed on connected? Sounds like windows thinks it needs something off that other drive and maybe a reinstall would fix.

Windows was installed that way. In fact, it was pre-installed on the laptop.

[Zygomorphic]

No, LINUX has no problems with GPT. Actually, there is a better method - install LINUX after installing Windows, and let it install the bootloader to whichever drive is the first to boot in the BIOS. It will find your Windows installation on the other drive, and insert an option to boot that too. That's how I do my system with 2 HDD's and three OS's (one time five: LINUX Mint+Win 8+Win 7 Ult, Linux Ubuntu+Win 7 HP). No problems at all! 🙂

[Dr__Zchivago]

Zygomorphic wrote:
No, LINUX has no problems with GPT. Actually, there is a better method - install LINUX after installing Windows, and let it install the bootloader to whichever drive is the first to boot in the BIOS. It will find your Windows installation on the other drive, and insert an option to boot that too. That's how I do my system with 2 HDD's and three OS's (one time five: LINUX Mint+Win 8+Win 7 Ult, Linux Ubuntu+Win 7 HP). No problems at all! 🙂

What benefit is there to having more than two OS's installed?

I could see Linux + Windows, or Win Server + Win 8, but five?!?!

Gee-willickers, Zygoman!!!