Dual-boot questions (but not about Windows)

2026-04-10 14:44 UTC

Background: I’ve been running Linux Mint XFCE for a couple of years now, Windows 10 has been sitting unused on a separate drive but it turns out the one thing I need it for works passably in a VM so it’s time to bin it. I’ve used Fedora Atomic (UBlue) on some laptops and I like it so that seems like a good candidate to replace the Windows install, and Mint can hang around for when I need a “normal” Linux install. Worry: I tried dual-booting them together on a laptop before and I couldn’t get grub to recognise both installs, it only detected the most recently installed one and after an evening of running commands way beyond my knowledge I gave up. I’m hoping that’s just because I installed them on the same disk though. Question: does anyone successfully dual-boot a Fedora Atomic install and a “normal” install? If so then what did you do to set it up and did you encounter any issues? And if you’re feeling extra helpful, do you have any pro tips for setting up shared storage between the two distros or backups for either?

Replies (3)

@zostdeemas@friendica.eskimo.com 2026-04-10 16:57

@smeg@feddit.uk It sounds like the issue might be that you are running them on separate drives, as opposed to partitions. You may have two installations of Grub. You might have to run update-grub on the older installation in order to re-detect everything because grub will detect the installations on other drives but the second one did not yet exist at the time it was installed on the first drive. And, it all depends on which drive the computer is actually booting from. If you have two versions of grub, then the one that launches is the one that the computer boots up from. If that one hasn't detected what is on the other drive, then you won't see it.

Open ##1049703
@Telorand@reddthat.com 2026-04-10 15:49

>Windows 10 has been sitting unused on a separate drive... Maybe you could clarify a few things. You say Windows was on a separate drive, but then you talk about dual booting. Do you mean that Windows was on another partition on a shared drive, or do you have two separate hard drives? If you have Mint on one hard drive and uBlue on another, seems to me what you should be looking at is adding an entry to Grub. I've only ever done this with Limine, but I would imagine it similarly involves editing some config and running a rebuild command to refresh Grub. There should be plenty of info about how to do this, given how old and ubiquitous Grub is. If it's two partitions on the same drive, it might be similar, but I don't know. Tbh though, I'm at a loss as to why you want to dual boot an atomic distro and a typical one. You should be able to do almost everything a normal distro can do by using Distrobox. If you prefer having total control over everything, why bother with an atomic distro? What problem are you trying to solve?

Open ##1566316
@bizdelnick@lemmy.ml 2026-04-10 17:46

> I’m hoping that’s just because I installed them on the same disk though. No. It does not matter where they are installed. Usually Grub successfully finds all distros installed. I guess that it fails because of some Atomic distro differences. If you use Grub from Fedora Atomic, it should also find a "normal" distro.

Open ##1566318