I have my old 10 install and my Mint install on different drives. I just unplug the one I don't want and swap them physically to change.

It was a great point of friction when I switched to Linux because booting Windows meant actual physical action which acted as a deterrent.

I run this pretty much exact setup, with Windows and Linux on 2 drives.

Definitely run 2 drives.

Set the main boot in the BIOS to the Linux drive, you can get grub to recognize windows so your boot menu goes to linux by default, but you can still select windows if you feel like slumming it. This keeps windows from messing with Grub.

If you intend to install both, install Windows first. It has a habit of overwriting other bootloaders.

When you install Linux second, it should install a bootloader that will let you choose which OS to boot each time you turn on the computer.

Always backup data you care about. Installing an OS carries some risk of data loss.

If you have two drives, you can put linux on one and windows on the other fine

If you have one drive, you can split it into two at partition step.

I was pentabooting with 4 linux and 1 windows at some point. It works fine.

Just remember to save your microsoft account password somewhere just in case they lock your windows account for some reason.

Also a cool tip. Installing linux aftet windows works perfectly, but installing windows after linux often breaks grub.

It sure is possible, I'm currently dual booting win11 and fedora on my laptop, so they actually share a drive.

If you want to do it on one drive I'd recommend first shrinking your windows partition to whatever size your comfortable with in the windows disk management tool (whatever they call it, I don't remember off the top of my head), then when you initialize a Linux mint install it should be able to recognize that windows partition. From there it'll give you the option to either wipe the whole drive, or install in the empty space alongside Windows.

For what it's worth I've had little to no issues dual booting both, it's been working for me just fine. Although I will say, I think I actually have bitlocker encryption disabled, though I can't say for certain and am unable to check at the moment. It would make sense for that to cause issues, so it would definitely be worth looking into.

Totally possible.

I recommend making room on your drive using windows tools to shrink the windows partition before letting your Linux installer add new ones, or doing it manually. This is just so that no weird filesystem bugs show up after resizing your ntfs filesystem with Linux tools. Never had a problem with them but it's probably good to use Microsoft tools to mess with the Microsoft filesystem just in case.

Dual booting is fine. Bitlocker just makes it so that the installer isn't able to resize the Windows partition (since it's encrypted), but you can resize it in Windows to create enough space to put Mint on. You can also disable bitlocker entirely, but your files will no longer be encrypted.

There's worry about the bootloader being nuked, but I think that's a bit of an overreaction. Now everything is EFI, Windows shouldn't touch other OSes. If it does, then that doesn't require a full reinstall; it's possible to boot from the live USB (the installer) and reinstall just the bootloader.

Listen I've got garuda (the only thing I touch if I can help it), windows 11 (idk why but it hasn't been able to update in a long time, so it's basically useless), windows 10 on hdd (actually might be 8), and a 10 year old copy of Ubuntu on an hdd as my boot options because I just copied my college hdds when I upgraded them a few years ago.

No one mentioned this yet, but a possible issue is that Windows, for some damn reason, still creates a 100MiB EFI partition, although by EFI spec It should be at least 256 iirc

This can cause the /boot/EFI partition to fill up. Some distros/bootloader are more affected than others, but I've had it happen a couple of times

Yes. But like @18107@aussie.zone said, Windows has a bad tendency to overwrite the bootloader, and that can happen down the road during an update of theirs.
That's why people recommend using a separate physical drive to install linux on if dualbooting with windows, because then you choose what you want to boot up on with the UEFI boot menu instead which Windows can't overwrite (yet?).

You can still use Windows 10 connected to the internet. Same safety precautions apply whether you're on Linux or Windows 10.

1. Don't run executables from the internet unless you trust them. Be extra cautious with Windows 10.
2. Close all the open inbound ports in Windows Firewall (you don't need them for anything anyway).
3. Close them all again because FFS WINDOWS I CLOSED THEM FOR A REASON SO STOP OPENING THEM.
4. Use a browser that's still getting security updates, so if you're on Microsoft Edge for some reason then ... nevermind if you're still on Microsoft Edge in 2025 then there's no saving you.
5. Keep physical access restricted. I gave up trying to configure bitlocker but if you can set it up then that'll better resolve this.
6. Keep an eye out for news of critical vulnerabilities, particularly ones that score high in terms of "Base Metrics".

I've also put in a firewall rule that prevents Microsoft Edge from accessing the internet entirely, but that's more out of spite than security. Windows keeps overriding my Firewall settings anyway so I don't think it'll have much of an effect.

I have had a Windows+Tumbleweed dual boot installed for years on a single SSD. The only precaution I take is to disable secure boot in BIOS because it is true that Windows sometimes encrypts the entire disk during updates and prevents you from accessing Linux. In short, disable secure boot and enjoy dual boot. 😉

In addition to dual booting, you can create a persistent USB drive. It's a little tedious, but kind of a cool way to give your setup a spin.

I think you need Rufus to format the drive, to set up the USB drive so it doesn't refresh when you reboot. I'm sure there are speed implications, but I've actually found it snappy enough for basic stuff once it loads. It's a cool way to try different distros. I have a handful lying around. I still preferred mint in the end.

I’m currently dual-booting Windows 11 and Fedora Silverblue (actually the ublue-os/silverblue-nvidia image) with secure boot enabled. No BitLocker, though.

Dual boot sucks in the long run. Every time you run a system update on windows or Linux you run the risk of messing up your boot loader.

I recommend not dual booting. Either use a VM for windows or have a dedicated machine that's windows only.

Yes but I do recommend installing the two OSes on a different storage device. That's what I did for my PC.

Linux Mint's boot option will eventually get over-written by Windows' updates. You will lose the ability to load Mint, be it in a week's time, in a month's time, or a year's time, but be sure, it will happen.

The correct way to run Mint alongside Windows is to install Mint on a usb stick (non-live). Here's how:

1. Get TWO usb sticks. One to hold the bootable live iso (16 GB minimum), and one to install to (64 GB minimum).
2. Go to BIOS and DISABLE the internal SSD that has Windows in it. At least DELL & Thinkpad laptops' BIOSes can do this. This is important, otherwise Mint has a bug during installation where it always installs the bootloader on the internal SSD, EVEN if you explicitly tell it to do it on its own USB stick or partition. So it's best for Mint to not be able to see temporarily the internal SSD.
3. Boot with the burned usb stick, and install Mint on the other usb stick. You can select automatic installation, or you can do it manually: create a 1 GB fat32 /boot partition (make sure you give it the boot flag), 4 GB swap partition, and the rest / (root).
4. Boot after installation with the newly installed usb (remove the installation usb) to make sure mint works well. Check webcam too, not just audio/wifi/bluetooth.
5. Re-enable the internal SSD again.
6. You can now boot on the installed usb during boot time by pressing f12, and selecting the usb stick instead of Windows.

Note: You can choose to install Mint on a separate SSD if this is not a laptop, or an external SSD with enclosure. These will last more than a usb stick (the rewrites destroy the usb stick within a year or two in my experience). But it's a good first start and it works overall well. I have done it that way 3 times so far, for laptops where we couldn't change the emmc/ssd/hdd (in one of the laptops the ssd controller was dead, the other one had a bad emmc, and the other one was old and the usb stick was actually faster than the hard drive), so we installed on usb sticks.