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Chuck Wintle
03-12-2015, 6:24 PM
I have an older computer that still works and found a good deal online for a 128GB Sandisk SSD which i bought in the hopes of speeding up everything. It worked until I go the bright idea of making a dual boot windows/linux.

I tried to get rid of linux later and when I resized the partitions the SSD caused the computer to hang on initial boot up. The SSD was bricked or so i thought. using an external Sata connection I was able to reformat and reuse the SSD. It was a close call though.
Phil Thien
03-12-2015, 6:39 PM
That is more like the "dual boot back to single boot saga."
Chuck Wintle
03-12-2015, 6:43 PM
That is more like the "dual boot back to single boot saga."

LoL. You are so right. Linux has a long way to go before it ever overtakes Windows as an OS. Bill Gates should not be worried.
Garth Almgren
03-12-2015, 7:55 PM
LoL. You are so right. Linux has a long way to go before it ever overtakes Windows as an OS. Bill Gates should not be worried.
I don't think he loses any sleep over it. :D
Curt Harms
03-13-2015, 7:39 AM
LoL. You are so right. Linux has a long way to go before it ever overtakes Windows as an OS. Bill Gates should not be worried.
I'm not sure Bill Gates cares - I believe he's sold the majority of his Microsoft stock. You said this is an older machine, I assume it's not a UEFI machine and no secure boot? I'm curious because I may find myself doing the same thing one day. Some funky BIOS code?
Dan Hintz
03-13-2015, 7:58 AM
I had to build a tri-boot machine for my boss about a year back... a MacBook with iOS, Windows, and Linux. It made my eye twitch something fierce. In the end, the Linux distro was screwing up something on the bootloader. I ended up handing it off to people smarter than me in such regards. They figured it out (eventually), something about using a tweaked (or updated) bootloader, but everything else was straightforward. Of course, all it takes is a tiny problem to make the entire thing useless.
Curt Harms
03-13-2015, 8:29 AM
I use a 3rd party boot manager, Bootit BM which has worked pretty well once I learned its' peculiarities. It creates an Extended Master Boot Record and will find and deal with Windows' bootloader. The trick with linux distros is to put GRUB in the O.S. partition, not in the MBR/track0(?) of the hard drive. Each O.S. thinks it's the only O.S. on the hard drive unless I tell it different. Works well on conventional BIOS machines but doesn't work on UEFI or hybrid MSDOS/UEFI BIOSes.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-bare-metal.htm
Curt Harms
03-13-2015, 8:39 AM
I had to build a tri-boot machine for my boss about a year back... a MacBook with iOS, Windows, and Linux. It made my eye twitch something fierce. In the end, the Linux distro was screwing up something on the bootloader. I ended up handing it off to people smarter than me in such regards. They figured it out (eventually), something about using a tweaked (or updated) bootloader, but everything else was straightforward. Of course, all it takes is a tiny problem to make the entire thing useless.

I suspect that GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader), the default Linux boot loader is optimized for IBM compatible BIOSes and Macs don't get the same attention. The switch from GRUB 1.x to 2.x brought with it considerable changes but I'd have thought that by last year the potholes from that change would have been smoothed out. Maybe not on Macs though, dunno.
John Coloccia
03-13-2015, 8:41 AM
Virtual machines, for the win.
Dan Hintz
03-13-2015, 8:58 AM
GRUB, that was it, Curt. Linux is not really my thing, so I was surprised I was being tasked with it (honestly, I think it was a lull in work for me, so they figured it was a good use of available resources). I learned a lot, but since I didn't get it working myself, it was a limited learning session.
Phil Thien
03-13-2015, 9:45 AM
Virtual machines, for the win.


Uhu. VirtualBox (was Sun now Oracle) is pretty decent (and free).
Myk Rian
03-13-2015, 11:44 AM
Virtual machines, for the win.
^^^This^^^
I have virtual Win xp and Android on my Win 7 machine.
John Coloccia
03-13-2015, 1:01 PM
Can you get OSX to run in a VM? I'm not even sure the licensing allows you to do that, but just from a technical standpoint, I wonder if the VM can be configured to get OSX going.
Myk Rian
03-13-2015, 4:07 PM
Can you get OSX to run in a VM? I'm not even sure the licensing allows you to do that, but just from a technical standpoint, I wonder if the VM can be configured to get OSX going.
Apparently you can.
http://lifehacker.com/5938332/how-to-run-mac-os-x-on-any-windows-pc-using-virtualbox