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I have this situation:

HDD 1: Windows 10 installation (personal use) HDD 2: Windows 10 installation (work use) HDD 2 Partition 5: Ubuntu Installation (don't care, but needed for grub)

I cannot boot my personal installation and hibernate it, then switch to work use, and vice versa. This is because of hibernating drives can be mounted outside of their boot session and can cause data corruption - but not really cause I don't mount these drives.

I want to be able to hibernate personal use, then switch to work use, and vice versa. Grub bootloader ALLOWS this. But, there is a 10GB partition for Ubuntu. I would really love to make say a 200MB partition to ONLY install the necessary grub files onto. How can I do this?

Seth
  • 131

1 Answers1

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I finally got this figured out, thank you all for the links and help in this stupid problem lol. I would love if there was a "grub only" iso that you could install, but sadly there is not.

SOLUTION:

  1. Install Windows onto HDD1, unplug HDD1, install windows HDD2.
  2. Plug in HDD1
  3. Make a 10GB partition on any of the drives
  4. Install Ubuntu to that partition
  5. Make sure Grub is installed and working (you can boot back and forth between windows installs)
  6. Boot from live linux USB (choose "try ubuntu")
  7. Mount the partition that has the full ubuntu installation on it.
  8. Using thunar, delete everything, EXCEPT - /boot and /etc/grub*
  9. Use gparted to shrink the ubuntu partition to 100MB
  10. Use gparted to extend the windows installed partition
  11. Sadly, windows won't automatically see this partition change, so I ran chkdsk on it and that fixed the incorrect partition sizes being reported. I think there is another way to refresh that tho.

We now have GRUB as my bootloader showing both versions of windows allowing me to pick between each either at a full power off (shut down) or after a hibernate. I am finally happy lol.

NOTE: Grub makes it's own partition to hold the UEFI boot stuff in it. This partition is what shows up in the BIOS boot menu of your device.

PS: You can take a backup of the drive and if ever need to redo the process, you can simply make a 100MB partition and copy the backup back, then use the live usb to reinstall GRUB.

EDIT: have not tested, but diskpart > rescan drives should update the partitions without doing a full ckdsk

Seth
  • 131