Windows 8 and Linux in dual-boot mode
Pair of Boots
Although getting Windows to play nice with an existing Linux installation is difficult, with a few tricks, you can set up Windows 8 to dual-boot with Linux.
In 1982, Microsoft MS-DOS 1.25 could confidently assume it would be the only system on the boot medium – after all, it booted from a floppy disk. Hard disks did not even enter into the equation until MS DOS 2.0, when the new IBM PC was released.
Thirty years after MS-DOS 1.25, Microsoft is still unwilling to accommodate co-tenants: Just like its predecessors, it dumps its boot sector onto the hard drive during installation, even if the disk already contains another boot loader.
Whereas modern operating systems like Linux make do with any corner of the hard disk that has enough free space, Windows 8 still clings to its antiquated ways, insisting on installing in a primary partition. However, despite Microsoft's denial of the existence of other systems, and despite menaces such as UEFI Secure Boot [1], you can talk Linux and Windows 8 into sharing the same disk. In this article, I show you how to set up Windows in a dual-boot configuration on a computer that is already running Linux.
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