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Re: Upgrading Older Desktop to Linux Mint 20.3

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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