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Upgrading Older Desktop to Linux Mint 20.3

On last week's Zoom call and in a subsequent post, I raised the question of
updating an old (2014) Dell XPS 8700 from Linux Mint 18.3 to the latest
version 20.3. I wanted to set up a dual boot environment with both versions
and was having difficulty figuring out how to do so with the Legacy (MBR)
BIOS.  With encouragement from Jean-François and John Nash, I decided to go
the route of setting up a new Mini-PC before blowing up my existing
environment.

For just under $300 on Amazon.ca, I bought a little Kamrui Mini-PC with a
Celeron J4125 processor, 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a 256 GB M2 SSD - not quite as
minimalist as a Raspberry Pi, but still...  Again on the advice received in
the call and follow-up emails, I used the Windows disk manager to shrink
the size of the Windows partition and it was then a piece of cake to
install Linux in the remaining space.  The little machine has an expansion
slot for another SSD (a standard 2.5 in), so I can do that later if I
want.  Now that I had a fallback option, I took another run at the old
Dell...

After a number of attempts to install Mint 20.3 on a secondary SSD on my
old desktop, I kept receiving an error message that it could not install
the boot loader on the new drive.  I finally decided to leave it to install
the boot loader on the original drive, thinking that I could set up dual
booting afterwards... Wrong!  The XPS 8700 machine now boots to the new
drive in Mint 20.3 but I cannot boot the old 18.3 environment, although all
of the data is still there on the old disk.  In any case, I have pretty
much managed in a couple of hours to restore my working environment (NAS
mounts, applications and utilities) on the new system although I still have
a hankering to wipe the system clean, update the BIOS to the latest version
and convert the machine to a pure UEFI boot mode.   Now that I've been
through the exercise once, I know that it is not such a huge problem to
configure a new install.  I also have a full backup on my NAS if I need to
go back and recover any more config files for apps and utilities I have yet
to reinstall...

Nonetheless, I am still curious to know if it's possible with the existing
situation to get the machine to dual boot both Mint 18.3 and 20.3.  Any
suggestions?

Thanks,

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