Dualboot with Windows 10

Hi,
Currently I have installed Windows 10 on my SSD. I’m planning to buy second SSD and install on it Fedora. Windows is installed in UEFI mode, also it is PC, not a laptop. What’s the best way to install Fedora on second drive? I want to have separated two EFI partition on each drive for both systems. Do I have to remove W10 drive during Fedora installation or maybe I can do that without that?

Best regards.

There are 2 ways.

  1. remove the windows drive and install fedora on the other.
    This will prevent fedora from seeing the windows install and make it necessary to either use the bios boot menu to boot windows or fedora: or to manually create a grub menu entry to boot the windows install from grub.

  2. leave the windows drive in place, but select only the new drive for the install of fedora. This will limit the installer to writing only to the new drive and create the needed partitions there. It may be necessary to use manual partitioning and not the auto partitioning if doing this (I have not tried this with dual boot so cannot vouch for the install). Since the installer is restricted from writing to the windows drive I cannot vouch for how the os-prober will find and configure windows booting with grub, though it may do so automatically or you may still need to configure the grub menu manually for windows as well.

I do not use different efi partitions when dual booting so personally have not dealt with your desired situation. When sharing the efi partition it works well automatically.

Doesn’t this first option will ensure me to have separated efi partitions? Then I’ll be able to run a system via choosing it in BIOS, yes?
When you have common EFI for both systems, it is a problem to run second system when drive which include EFI is broken, yes?

Yes, to both.
The second option also gives separate efi partitions, but allows the installer to read the first drive and may allow it to automatically configure booting windows for you.

There are ways to use 2 different efi partitions and still configure grub to boot the windows system while the primary boot device runs the fedora grub (avoiding using the bios boot menu). This is what I meant when I said you can create a grub menu to boot windows from the fedora partition.

There have been discussions here about dual booting with 2 efi partitions and having grub manage the boot of both (or multiple) systems.

Drive failure, while it does occur, is rare and in over 30 years I have never seen a boot drive fail. The last issue I had was in the early stages of home pcs (IIRC it was an 80286 machine) and my HDD was only 20 MB in size. That tells you how far back that was and how old the technology was by today’s standards. In fact, even with HDDs I have only had one actual failure in those 30 years and it was a raid drive so did not cause data loss. New drives about every 7 to 10 years (when I build a new PC) and most running 24x7 year round.

Well, interesting story. I don’t even remember times of these memory sizes :smiley:.
But I’ll probably feel safer to do that with unmounted W10 for the first time. So in steps:

  1. Make bootable pen
  2. Unmount W10 drive
  3. Mount new SSD
  4. Install Fedora on new SSD
  5. Switch off PC
  6. Mount W10 drive
  7. Test if both OSes are working fine?

Can I the try to add GRUB manually? To work with W10?

Yes, that is what I said above.

Installing fedora will install grub.
Manually editing a grub menu will allow it to boot windows.