Advice for dual boot setup

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sysrqer
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Advice for dual boot setup

Post by sysrqer »

I have a laptop with two hard drives in, one 1tb main drive for linux in the main drive slot, and one 500gb in the CD drive slot with a converter bay running windows.

Lately windows is incredibly slow, I'm not sure what's wrong, whether it's the drive failing, the connection bottleneck, or windows itself. I suspect it is the drive, it is very old so it would't be surprising if it's on its last legs.

One annoying thing about this set up is that I can't access the linux files from windows. So I've been thinking of getting an SSD to split between linux and windows, then using my 1tb drive for storage in the CD drive slot and format it to something that both can read.

I'm a bit concerned about the read speed of the CD drive slot though and having all my files there, is the bottleneck going to be much different than the main drive slot?
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by lucianodato »

What you are planning is the preferred setup often. Running both OSes in the ssd drive will run faster. You can check you sata version using

Code: Select all

dmesg | grep SATA
For example in mine I get:

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[    2.070849] ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0300 32 slots 6 ports 6 Gbps 0x3 impl SATA mode
[    2.088785] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf7916000 port 0xf7916100 irq 26
[    2.088788] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 abar m2048@0xf7916000 port 0xf7916180 irq 26
[    2.403509] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[    2.403600] ata2: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[178720.093447] ata2: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[178722.682967] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
Links of 6.0 Gbps are Sata3 and 3.0 Gbps are sata2 . If one of your ports is sata 2 use the data disk there and the ssd should be in the sata 3. It's that simple.
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by sysrqer »

Excellent thanks, looks like I have a 6 and a 3 so I will follow your advice.

Any tips on the filesystem to use on the data disk? I would like windows to be able to read it ideally but it depends on the speed sacrifice I suppose if any. NTFS I guess is the only option but how does it compare to ext4?
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

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sysrqer wrote:Excellent thanks, looks like I have a 6 and a 3 so I will follow your advice.

Any tips on the filesystem to use on the data disk? I would like windows to be able to read it ideally but it depends on the speed sacrifice I suppose if any. NTFS I guess is the only option but how does it compare to ext4?
Your only option is NTFS. FAT32 or exFAT are way slower. AFAIK It wont matter much. Say for example you have an Ardour or any daw project in your data drive It will function without problems, no lags or anything. I have the same setup and everything works flawlessly out of the box. 8)
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by Luc »

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I used to dual boot with Windows (and it was my primary OS) and I had at least three partitions: Win, Lin and data, and data partition was formatted as FAT32. Obviously, both Win and Lin could read and write on the data partition.

I would never bother with dual booting today, especially as MSFT always seemed to work hard to make dual booting ever more difficult. I've been using VMware for any kind of Windows business I may have for more than 10 years and it's been flawless in the last 8 years or so. Pretty fast, too. I bet anyone could use it in full screen and never realize it's a virtual machine until they had to reboot. I also used it in my old & slow netbook and the performance was good enough.
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by lucianodato »

Luc wrote:A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I used to dual boot with Windows (and it was my primary OS) and I had at least three partitions: Win, Lin and data, and data partition was formatted as FAT32. Obviously, both Win and Lin could read and write on the data partition.

I would never bother with dual booting today, especially as MSFT always seemed to work hard to make dual booting ever more difficult. I've been using VMware for any kind of Windows business I may have for more than 10 years and it's been flawless in the last 8 years or so. Pretty fast, too. I bet anyone could use it in full screen and never realize it's a virtual machine until they had to reboot. I also used it in my old & slow netbook and the performance was good enough.
It seems that he is using windows for audio and VMs are a no no for that. Don't know if VMware supports pass-through though.
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by tavasti »

lucianodato wrote: It seems that he is using windows for audio and VMs are a no no for that. Don't know if VMware supports pass-through though.
I would not expect much problems with audio, because audio interface can be passed to virtual machine, but graphics is much harder (for games). For most computers it is hard to get another video card.

Has anybody tried running virtual windows in kvm for audio purposes?

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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by lucianodato »

tavasti wrote:
lucianodato wrote: It seems that he is using windows for audio and VMs are a no no for that. Don't know if VMware supports pass-through though.
I would not expect much problems with audio, because audio interface can be passed to virtual machine, but graphics is much harder (for games). For most computers it is hard to get another video card.

Has anybody tried running virtual windows in kvm for audio purposes?
I have and I couldn't make it work without latency using a usb2 soundcard.
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by sysrqer »

42low wrote: There are a lot off problems with this. Mostly as one OS resets or claims the bios so that the other OS doens't work anymore.
If you're talking about what I think you are then that's a pretty simple problem to overcome if you know how to and only really happens (or becomes problematic) when you install windows after linux. Never had any issue with it once both are installed and set up.

It's no less stable to have a partition with Windows installed, for linux it's just another partition. As far as I know grub is the only thing that has any interaction between the two.

It isn't analogous to using wine, that's a whole different kettle of fish.
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Re: Advice for dual boot setup

Post by tavasti »

42low wrote:My vision on dual boot is that it doesn't work proper.
There are a lot off problems with this.
For me worst problem with dual boot is booting: all programs closing on boot! I tend to reboot about once a month.
42low wrote:I'm no fan of competing OS's on one computer. 8)
Same here. Haven't used windows since november 1994, so why would I use it now? I don't even have windows license.

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