This One Step Could SAVE Your Private Data From Windows (Dual Boot)

One tip when dualbooting is to turn off fast boot in Windows. When fast boot is enabled Windows will not unmount NTFC when you turn off the computer, and if you turn it on and select Linux the NTFC partition will not be accessible. If you reboot from Windows to Linux, then Windows will always unmount.

Never mount hard drives to your user folder in Linux. Use the correct location /mnt and create a soft link from /mnt to your user folder. Auto mounting drives to a user folder can create boot issues and even lock you out of your account. Keep in mind a hibernating NTFS drive will not mount in Linux causing your system not to boot. Don't say you haven't been warned.

Useful, informative, timely and VERY important. Thank you so much for putting together such a helpful guide!

Upgrade your current computers as much as you can while you have one that doesn't have NPUs. You can always use them for Linux later when Windows 10 isn't updated anymore.

Do NOT dual boot unless you're ready to fix problems! I'm a full time Linux user, and one thing that messed me up the MOST in the beginning is dual booting. Windows loves to auto update. That tends to break the boot loader. When that happens, you lose easy access to the Linux. Getting it back through grub is a pain for new users. I found that if you really need Windows, it's better to run it inside a VM with Linux as a host. Now I don't use windows for personal use. Don't seem to actually need it.

Thanks for sharing 👍

What timing! I had planned this task for the summer holiday. Tomorrow I'll add a separate SSD (I'm on a desktop), then go wild in Linux Mint and make it my daily driver.

Thanks for all you do

I personally love using a QEMU GPU pass through virtual machine on my Linux mint set-up to run windows applications. You need a second GPU as you have to isolate a GPU from your linux system to pass to the VM(so it cannot be used by the host Linux OS) and that is indeed a very fiddly/technical process...but once you get it to work - it works fantastically even for stuff like gaming and other intensive processes! If set up correctly - your VM essentially has near bare metal performance! I do also have a dual boot option(Linux or Windows 10) via the grub menu - which i set up using grub customizer tool, this tool is amazing!

I think it makes more sense to run Windows as a Client OS (VM) within Linux (Host OS).

Thanks for the tip. Saves me a bit of money, my alternative until now, was a 2nd PC (older HW, so without AI chip).

Thank you for confirming I'm on the right path. I set up Linux on a 2nd drive 3 years ago. Encrypted too to make absolutely sure Windows cannot see it at all when it is running. I run Windows mainly for SolidWorks. I have run Windows10 in VirtualBox in Linux, but it is clunky. Good thing with that one is I keep it completely offline by disabling network access to the VM.

Perfect! I'm in the middle of installing dual boot. Issue was Ubuntu did NOT recognize my raid, but instead saw both disk and not the raid (hardware through ASUS motherboard raid). Work around was to use a USB for Ubuntu, however its really slow. Lastly, I'm going to reload windows on a partition on one drive, using the rest for ntfs storage partition, and use the other drive for ubuntu. Dual boot. Lots of work and time here. Thanks for talking me into using Ibuntu! 😅

The time is now to dump windows, mac and google. I'll be reaching out to all my favorite app makers that aren't available on Linux yet, and running a quarantined box for games. Need a good option for a phone still.

First Godzilla and now Windows. Scary stuff

Cant thank you enough for doing all the research for all of us. 🙏🏻

The thumbnail is hilarious! So, we should protect our data by teaching our PCs to XD? 😆🤣😂

I've been lurking your channel for a long time Rob. I am in the same situation as you but I use two different computers 😂. Now for casual Windows usage, I will run Windows as a guest VM on a Linux host using KVM / virt-manager as type 1 hypervisors offer more performance for the VMs. Davinci Resolve can be a problem to run if you don't use Rocky Linux or CENT OS. I suppose if you are super gifted, some could use Proxmox and spin up a Windows VM and configure Proxmox to passthrough on its own NVIDIA card and configure Proxmox to use another video card for all things Linux VMs. That way, Windows runs in its own jail where it belongs. A Proxmox hypervisor solution would require 2 video cards for this specific scenario utilizing a VM solution with maximum performance within on metal install performance of 10 percent.

Using 2 separate systems 1, Windows that is a lesser powered machine (small boxes are not expensive), ONLY running limited apps that demand windows or google account. 2, More powerful Linux machine. Using USB switchbox to share keyboard & mouse.

Thanks Rob, for great factual useful info as usual and I am in process of learning to stitch to Linux but want Win minus all the spyware already on there capturing all my data as was going to do VM on Windows (but now different view now) TY.