Gonna give Linux another try, any guidance is welcome!

[kirk@startrek.website]

Fedora is a solid choice. I recommend Kinoite because it's familiar to Windows users and impossible to break.

[dagnet@lemmy.world]

Turns out my boot partition was on my other drive somehow (the drive I installed Linux) , am I completely fucked now?

[webghost0101@sopuli.xyz]

For new users the main question is not what operating system but what window manager as that is what shapes day to day user interaction. KDE plasma is a solid choice.

Installing it on a separate drive should be no problem. Just select the correct drive during install.

I use F10 to get to the boot menu on drive and select the drive it needs to boot from there. I have used it once in the last year and although it required many updates its still working.

[blayd@lemmy.ml]

Did you manually partition? It sounds like when you installed Nobara the /boot/efi partition got formatted, a similar thing happened to me recently (just wasnt paying attention), I used a Windows install USB to get a command prompt and restore the EFI entry.

[baumgeist@lemmy.ml]

Can someone please guide me into installing it the safest way possible?

1. Get the installation image you want to use. Fedora has a lot of different flavors, I think they call them "spins," so it's important to know the difference and choose the right one for you.

2. Install it on a VM in VirtualBox. Play around with it, figure out what all the installation steps do, don't be afraid to break the VM.

3. Play around with the VM in fullscreen just to get a feel for it. Don't blame the OS for performance issues, that's probably just the resource limitations of a VM.

4. Repeat steps 1-3 as necessary to find an OS that is comfortable enough to be your daily driver.

5. Use a program like Rufus to make a bootable USB out of the installation image.

6. Run the installer like you practiced. MAKE SURE YOU SELECT THE CORRECT HARDDRIVE, DON'T OVERWRITE YOUR WINDOWS DRIVE. Otherwise, besides MAKING EXTRA SURE ABOUT WHICH HARDDRIVE YOU INSTALL IT TO, use defaults for settings you aren't sure about.

I want to install Fedora on a separate drive and keep my windows drive completely intact (Need it for work).

I cannot stress the above warning enough: formatting the drive is the one step in installation that cannot be undone. If you format your windows drive, you cannot ever recover that data anymore.

Since it's work related hardware, I have 2 pieces of advice; you should follow one or the other:

1. Don't. Don't fuck around with work hardware. It should be a separate PC that you literally only ever use to get work done. Whether it's owned by a company or you're self-employeed, mixing your hobby/leisure/gaming/tinker/daily driver with your work computer is a baaaaaad idea. You will get something all fuzzed up, you will try to fix it by reinstalling the OS or otherwise doing disk formatting/partitioning, and you will end up corrupting windows.

2. Okay, so you decided not to heed my warning because you like gaming (or whatever) too much and can't afford a separate desktop/tower rn. i get it, I did the same once and lived to tell the tale (i do have separate machines now, fwiw). In that case, before you install fedora, simply disconnect the Windows drive. Yank it right out and don't reinstall it until you've got linux up and running just how you like it. Not just after the installation, but after the configuration. Then there's no chance you accidentally format/corrupt your drive.

Preferably I would like GRUB to ask which boot option I want to use if my linux drive is set to be my boot drive and to boot straight to windows if its my windows drive set to boot.

If the installer gives you the option, simply install Grub on the same drive as Linux. When you select the linux drive in your BIOS' boot options, it will run grub, which will give you options, including booting into windows if you want. When you select the windows drive in your BIOS' boot options, it will use the windows bootloader (which boots straight into windows, unless you have multiple windows installations).

[nonbinary_sahrah@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

on the second part if you have an efi motherboard I can recommend the refind boot manager which is eseayer to set up.
and you can dual boot from multiple disks.
you have to install the package after setting up your fedora install

here is the official dokumentation from fedora
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Refind

[Guest]

I would use two different disks, the one that you have already for windows and a second one for Linux. When you're ready to install Linux Unplug the windows disk, so that you can't screw it up ( been there, did that ) then when you need to use either the Linux or Windows Just choose the start up disk in bios at booting, usually F11, a tiny bit longer than dual booting, but it will save you a lot of hassle. Dual booting is rather dangerous as windows has the annoying habit of wiping Linux grub setups when updating, and Linux has the annoying habit of wiping everything, two different disks, much easier.

[bcsven@lemmy.ca]

Windows only wipes Linux grub if the grub boot efi stuff gets installed into the windows disk EFI partition. Its best to specify a new EFI partition on the new disk so grub is isolated from windows. The distro OS probe should pickup an alternate OS on other disk and add a chainloader entry to Linux grub. Windows never knows there is another EFI partition if you do it this way.

[domi@lemmy.secnd.me]

Do you mean your Windows boot partition?

Windows does not support installing the boot partition on a different drive out of the box. Unless you modified your Windows installation, the drive where Windows is installed is also where the Windows boot manager lives.

The biggest risk with installing with the drive connected is accidentally installing the Linux boot partition over the Windows boot partition, hence the usual recommendation to disconnect the drive just to be safe.

You're gonna have to provide some more details on your setup and what is working/not working though.

[dagnet@lemmy.world]

It probably got moved when I reinstalled windows after trying nobora years ago. I managed to fix everything but tbh it was way more stressful than it should have been

[domi@lemmy.secnd.me]

Did you manage to install Linux to your second drive?

[dagnet@lemmy.world]

Yeah, mostly fixed stuff but now Im not getting audio. It defaults to my GPU's hdmi audio instead of my onboard sound

[domi@lemmy.secnd.me]

Do the audio settings show your onboard audio device?

[dagnet@lemmy.world]

I ran some terminal cmd (sry dont remember what it was) that gave me a weird UI inside the terminal that actually showed my onboard sound so I think my pc recognizes it somehow somewhere

[domi@lemmy.secnd.me]

You don't have to use the terminal, if you installed regular Fedora with GNOME, you can just search for "Sound" and it should come up with this:

If you installed Fedora KDE you can search for "Sound" as well and it should look like this:

[warmaster@lemmy.world]

Temporarily disconnect your Windows drive, install Bazzite (bazzite.gg) on a secondary drive, you'll be able to test how it runs on your hardware. If you want to keep it, just reconnect your Windows drive and chose whatever you want to boot to using your bios. You can set one of them to default, and you can temporarily boot to the other by pressing your motherboard's designated boot key (usually F11 or F12, look up yours)

[dagnet@lemmy.world]

I managed to make it work. Apparently the back audio doesnt work if someone is plugged to my front port, kinda annoying but I will survive. Thanks for the help though