Got an old laptop from a friend I’d like to rejuvenate, the plan is to set up a light distro so it wouldn’t be as slow as it is right now with windows 10.
Now, I’m aware windows updates can fuck up a dual boot system, so i have a few questions about how to minimize the threat of that happening.
What i think of doing is running a few scans to check the disk, then setting up Linux Mint, because it is beginner friendly, and (relatively) light weight.
What I’d need help with is trusted guides and also tips for setting up dual booting, I’m sure I’ll need to do disk partitioning and I’ve done that before but I’d still want to make sure I’m doing it correctly.
Any help would be welcome.
If the laptop supports dual drives (not unheard of but not the norm) it’s way safer to dual boot from different physical drives.
Whatever OS you choose make sure they have a guide for dual-booting. Any Linux OS should be capable of dual-boot but not all will support that configuration equally.
As a failsafe I would also make a rescue USB, especially SystemRescue because of the findroot option.
I dual booted a machine and I had to even unplug my windows drive to get it to install a Linux distro on the other drive. Windows really does not like playing nice with dual boot systems so it is always best to keep Windows on its own drive.