On Mon, Sep 15, 2025 at 10:01:24AM -0500, CAREY SCHUG wrote:
reminder again, this is to make it easier for a windows person to install linux but still have access to all their windows programs without having to boot back and forth all the time. try the linux version of some application, and compare it side by side with the windows version. Heck, even plug in two keyboards and have like two computers. Or with symmetry, boot windows and still have their full gaming abilities there, plus transition to linux for all the compute and database activity.
--ok on secureboot, I'm still confused enough to not understand
--i assume for disk encryption you mean full disk encryption. it seems to me (and I could be wrong) transparent encryption should be ok.
Any disk encryption on windows, since disk encryption on windows means bitlocker these days (and has for many years).
--since I think there are (built in or add-on?) schemes for pushing a running os to disk and migrating it to different hardware for the purpose of nonstop operation, it should be just as easy for that other hardware to actually be a virtual image (I think that was commonly done on other hardware in the 1990s)
And for the option of having a second disk so each disk is original, that secure boot and full disk encryption should still work. maybe need to have a third physical disk to share space between the operating systems?
The problem with disk encryption in the case of windows is that it uses the TPM hardware for the key, and that you can't transfer to a VM. So you have to disable bitlocker entirely to do a transfer to a VM. Windows even has to pause bitlocker when doing UEFI updates of the system since that tends to cause changes to TPM that breaks decrypting the disk. It is very fragile.
how would that work if each os had it's own dedicated physical disk?
The only difference having two drives causes is not having to repartition the drive to make room for the other OS to install.
would there still only be one uefi, even if booting off the other physical disk?
UEFI is the modern replacement of the BIOS. It is part of the motherboard, not the disk or the OS. Normally the boot partition (ESP) is shared even when dual booting under UEFI.
Nice to see the reply coming from the original hotbed of virtualization...university of waterloo
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