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I'm currently running Ubuntu 16.04.02 on a Samsung SSD. I would like to be able to dual boot my laptop so as to have Ubuntu running on the primary SSD for work purposes and then have Windows running on a secondary drive and use this for gaming and photoshop. I was given a 1TB HDD by a family member with the following partition table which I've just placed in my laptop's old optical drive bay using a hard drive caddy.
NAME FSTYPE SIZE MOUNTPOINT LABEL
sdb 931.5G
├─sdb1 vfat 100M SYSTEM
├─sdb2 ntfs 900M Recovery
├─sdb3 128M
├─sdb4 ntfs 372.2G OS
├─sdb5 ntfs 450M
├─sdb6 ntfs 537.8G Data
└─sdb7 ntfs 20G Restore
For reference, this is my primary drive's partition table:
NAME FSTYPE SIZE MOUNTPOINT LABEL
sda 232.9G
├─sda1 ntfs 450M Recovery
├─sda2 vfat 99M /boot/efi
├─sda3 16M
├─sda5 ext4 224.5G /
└─sda6 swap 7.9G [SWAP]
Is it possible to make a clean install of windows 10 on dev/sdb/
whilst keep my primary hard disk dev/sda/
unchanged with ubuntu running as I need this for work? Unfortunately, I do not have much experiences with partitioning.
My only concern would be the Windows installer might (unsure, that's why I don't write it as an answer) make use of the existing EFI system partition on the SSD instead of creating one in the HDD, which violates your requirement (and also making the Windows installation not standalone). One of the solutions could be (temporarily) changing the partition type of the ESP on the SSD to Microsoft Basic Data so that the Windows installer will not consider it as an ESP. Or if your laptop's UEFI has option to disable a disk, that would be a way too. – Tom Yan – 2017-08-29T12:58:50.600
@TomYan, they could also unplug the first drive as a solution whilst Windows is being installed. But first is the question of it being a laptop... – El8dN8 – 2017-08-29T13:06:34.333
1Current install of Windows is BIOS with MBR partitioning. Since Ubuntu is UEFI, you really want to install Windows in UEFI boot mode and how you boot installer UEFI or BIOS is then how it installs. But can you directly boot from drive caddy. Some users have reported they cannot, others can? – oldfred – 2017-08-29T14:04:03.213