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I have a laptop that has two different SSD disks (both NVME and 1TB). Since the machine is quite good I was thinking in using one disk for work and another for my personal use.

Same hardware, two independent disks, booting from different disks, but effectively with the same Operative system (ubuntu).

  1. How would I do this? I have searched for Dual boot and the hits I get are always related to Windows/Linux which is not what I want.
  2. Would this be a safe practice? My idea is that any vpn access, company data and so on, would not be accessible when I am using the laptop from my personal disk. Ie, even if my own personal disk and data is compromised, the company data wouldn't.
  3. Any other suggestions/warnings that you would have for this situation?

Thanks!

Luís F
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  • The system I'm using now is dual boot, it has Ubuntu impish (the development release) which I'm using now, and also Ubuntu focal (or 20.04 LTS). You just install, nothing special is required. I QA-test systems & have had >12 different OSes installed on boxes (over multiple disks, all control is available to you). I personally prefer the Something.else or Manual Partitioning as I fully control installs; but install alongside/auto-resize works too; I QA-tested Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu 20.04.3 ... on the box to my left & all co-exist happily – guiverc Aug 30 '21 at 12:46
  • Thank you guiverc. But how do you select to boot from one disk or the other. Is it at the start up that you say "from disk1" or "from disk2". A solution you seem to hint is to use two different ubuntus (for instance 20.04 vs. 21.04) and then you would know which drive you would be using. – Luís F Aug 30 '21 at 12:52
  • At boot I see grub which asks me which I want to boot. I can have it auto-select one choice, have it prefer whichever I last used, etc.. I think I've set the timer to 30 secs for this box; if I didn't select any; it'll boot the development or currently impish system that I'm currently using. This box only has a single drive; but it's no different on boxes with 2, 3 or more drives (the BIOS/uEFI controls which drive boots so multiple drives are the same as a single drive in effect) – guiverc Aug 30 '21 at 12:54
  • I like to partition in advance & have an ESP - efi system partition on each drive. But default install using Ubiquity installer only installs grub's UEFI boot files to first drive's ESP. You can do a work around to install grub to second drive, but will have two Ubuntu entries in UEFI unless you rename like rtaft's answer below or using a specific name using efibootmgr. Each grub will find other. Several work arounds: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1396379 & https://askubuntu.com/questions/16988/how-do-i-install-ubuntu-to-a-usb-key-without-using-startup-disk-creator – oldfred Aug 30 '21 at 14:39

1 Answers1

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Setup should be like any other OS combination. Install the OS on one disk, then go through the installation again but select the other disk.

Obviously the same OS would be listed twice in the grub menu, see How to safely change OS name in grub boot menu? for how to specify the name for each one. It has several viable solutions, I think this one is best for your setup. Edit /etc/default/grub with this change:

# GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`{ printf Work && lsb_release -d -s ; } 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`

This appends 'Work' to the OS, you can name the other OS 'Personal' too. Then update grub

sudo update-grub

For security, make sure you encrypt the work disk, otherwise you will still be able to easily access it from the personal one if it is compromised.

For potential issues, it's possible grub could get installed on each disk, where grub on the main disk doesn't see the second OS. That would just need grub reconfigured, or switch the default disk.

rtaft
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