How to set up a PC which can be booted from Linux AND Windows?

Posted by Martin on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Martin
Published on 2012-09-16T08:42:18Z Indexed on 2012/09/16 9:40 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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linux

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virtual-machine

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formatting

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multi-boot

Our PC was running Windows XP up to know. It has become incredibly slow and I'm considering switching to Linux (Ubuntu?!) as a fresh OS.

However, there are some applications we rarely use which run only on Windows and I also want to have the possibility to easily go back to the old system, if I should find during testing linux, that anything is missing or not available.

So the idea is to install Linux on a new (second) hard drive and use the existing Windows XP from a virtual machine (converted by Paragon Drive Backup) in the transition time.

We have a lot of data on the PC, tens of GBs of Photos (managed by Picasa), ...

My questions:

What could be the best way to setup the new hard drive? (Partitions) I assume that I can not access the Linux data from Windows but I could access (read/write) windows drives from Linux?
Does anyone know good tutorials for this use case?
What other things might I have to consider for transition Windows->Linux?

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