Others likely have more expertise in doing the details directly than I do, but I've had some
success with the grub-customizer application that in my experience has shown the available
distros and allows some adjustment of the boot up.
JN
On 2022-02-09 13:02, David Baril (dpbaril [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com) wrote:
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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