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Can I have 1 hard disk for Ubuntu and another for Windows. I have to use software for both systems. I know Virtual Box can do the same thing, but it is very slow for my computer. So is it possible. If yes, how to implement? Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thank you!

Thang
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  • I don't mean to install both systems on ONE disk. Instead, each system is installed in one disk. So when I turn on the computer, I can choose to use disk A or disk B. – Thang Jan 16 '14 at 05:25
  • Yes, it is possible. Simplest would be to have Ubuntu be on the primary boot drive used in BIOS. When installing Ubuntu, it should see the Windows install on the secondary drive, ask where you want to install Ubuntu and install GRUB as part of the process. At boot, GRUB will load and give the option for which OS to boot into. – douggro Jan 16 '14 at 16:26
  • Thank you @ImaginaryRobots, that is what I want :) sorry I didn't search harder. – Thang Jan 17 '14 at 00:54

2 Answers2

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Since my response was getting quite long, I felt it better to post as a new answer, rather than as another comment.

Just install them as two physical drives, and make sure you select the right one during install (i.e. so you're not overwriting the first OS with the second). What I'd do is leave one installed in your case but unplugged (the Windows installer isn't as high powered or intelligent as Ubiquity or an Ubuntu live medium), install Windows as normal to that disk, then shut down, plug in the new disk whilst leaving the first plugged in still, and boot the live installer for Ubuntu.

You'll need to choose a disk which is your "main" disk, because the bootloader needs to go on this disk. In times gone past, this was called a "master/slave" set up, I'm not sure if that still applies.

ImaginaryRobots
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ArminasAnarchy
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Sure you can. What you're talking about is generally called RAID, which has two main types:

RAID 0 (i.e. stripping - a file is broken into two smaller parts and one sent to each disk, which improves read time) RAID 1 (i.e. mirroring) - where a file is copied to BOTH disks, for the sake of redundancy (often used on servers).

Most modern motherboards are capable of RAID, usually at boot there will be an option to press something like Ctrl+I to enter into a simple utility (very BIOS like) for creating a RAID array. Once that's done, your OS would 'see' the disks as on single entity - it helps to have two identical disks e.g. of 250GB (so the array is 2x250GB = 500GB). All you'd do then is at installation use a partitioning tool like KPart or GParted to format the disks as you wanted.

Although my setup isn't current RAID (my workhorse computer is a laptop), I do dual boot. The balance I've found that works best is a tiny Ubuntu partition (or pair of partitions for / and /home) of 30GB (10+20), with all my data being on the Windows partition (which takes up the rest of my disk).

EDIT: It should be noted that technically RAID 0 has a reputation for halving the MTBF of your hard disks. However, given that that is usually thousands of hours, when I did run a RAID array, I never ran into problems. I left home (and that particular machine) behind before it finally gave out, after 5/6 years of heavy use!

ArminasAnarchy
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