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Nicholas Bourbaki avatar Ubuntu

Partitioning and installing Ubuntu on 2nd drive

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Nicholas Bourbaki

I'd like to reinstall Ubuntu 20.04 on a second drive on my PC. I believe my Gigabyte motherboard, ca. 2009 or 2010 is too old to support UEFI, thus I'll continue with MBR. I currently have a system where it duel boots Windows-10/ XUbuntu 20.04.2. The HDD is 1TB with 132 GB for Linux, 15 GB Linux SWAP, and the rest various Windows Partitions.

I'd like to keep the current GRUB boot loader where it is (some is on the MBR) and delete the Linux ext4 and Swap Partitions on the 1st harddrive.

I have a 2nd 1TB harddrive that used to have an old RedHat Linux OS on it. I tried to repartition it but that failed -- possibly I have to unmount it first. If I start the computer with that harddrive in place, it won't display a bootloader and will not boot to any OS. I can plug it in after boot and look at it tho.

I'd like to install Ubuntu on this harddrive but keep my bootloader on the first drive. A problem I have is that when Windows-10 does an "update", it automatically erases the Linux partitions. I need Linux for important engineering apps and don't want the data erased with every Windows update. On a 2nd drive I can unplug it before Windows updates, thus won't worry about it being erased.

Any suggestions on how to do this would be appreciated.
There wasn't anything about UEFI in the BIOS screens.

Gigabyte motherboard, ca. 2010? A careful inspection of this motherboard (I just installed it) does NOT show any model #.

The only trick here was that I did the Live install of Ubuntu (not writing to any hdd). Then with the PC still running I plugged in the 2nd drive and installed & ran Gparted. This allowed me to delete all the old partitions on the 2nd drive and create a new ext4 Linux partition + a 60 GB Linux swap partition.

Following the setup link provided by usr535733 how-to-install-ubuntu-on-separate-hard-drive-in-a-dual-boot I was able to get it to work. Attached is the Partition table as shown by MiniTool from the Windows-10 side. The Unallocated 147.5 GB partition used to hold all my Linux OS, data, & swap.

Partition table of both drives

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oldfred avatar
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oldfred
Link by usr535733 does not highlight the combo box at bottom that says device for boot loader. You want that to be your Linux drive, probably sdb, not the Windows drive. You then want Windows boot loader in Windows drive and set BIOS to boot as default the Linux drive. Grub only boots working Windows and there will be times you need to directly boot Windows using Windows boot loader. Still good idea to have Windows repair/recovery drive & keep Ubuntu live installer flash drives for future repairs.
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Nicholas Bourbaki avatar
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Nicholas Bourbaki
Unfortunately my situation is different. I currently have Linux partitions on my boot harddrive sda. There are old partitions existing on the second harddrive sdb. Attempting to clean this up has no resulted in a non-bootable system. I have a lot of partitioning work to do before I reach the state described in that link. This is where my problem is. How do I reclaim the Linux partitions on the Boot hard drive. I do not want two Linux installs: one on sda and one on sdb.
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Nicholas Bourbaki avatar
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Nicholas Bourbaki
Thank you to usr535733 + OldFred. As you can see I got it to work. The link was a lot of help. Also, I recall that SATA hard drives are hot-swappable. Originally booting with both drives was a problem because of the parts (like swap) of Red Hat Linux left on drive 2. Thus I booted to Live Ubuntu via DVD and then plugged in the 2nd drive and repartitioned it. Then I installed XUbuntu 20.04 on it.
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