Install Dual Boot question without disrupting existing Win10

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

Hello Beautiful and Amazing People:
Quick question before I install.

I’m currently duel booting with POP OS on a System 76 Pangolin (pang11) with 64GB RAM as my daily driver and a Win10 partition to play two games. I like POP OS but am really tired of how outdated software is on an LTS. (neomutt is 2 years and 6 versions behind! uggg).

After a full backup of my ~/Home directory using rsync, I’d like to try a LiveUSB and wonder if I’m just wasting my time. I’m not afraid of reinstalling POP if needed.

My question is, can I just format the POP partition and install EOS on that drive along with any recovery/swap partitions?

What I really want to avoid is having to backup and reinstall Windoze. That to me would be a nightmare. I’m willing to spend all day learning and working with Linux but really want to avoid anything that will disrupt that pain in the arse called Win10.

Here are my current partitions:

lsblk -f
NAME          FSTYPE FSVER LABEL     UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
zram0                                                                                    [SWAP]
nvme0n1                                                                                  
├─nvme0n1p1   vfat   FAT32           3745-FD37                              81.7M    84% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2   vfat   FAT32           3745-FD58                               1.2G    70% /recovery
├─nvme0n1p3   ext4   1.0             06f92bd0-9b27-4e80-8e94-4e9881f5d657  175.7G    21% /
├─nvme0n1p4   swap   1               e15badb0-a63f-4fc4-b3c4-ead62e110100                
│ └─cryptswap swap   1     cryptswap 211d536c-0206-4c7a-8e5f-7382f2d29449                [SWAP]
└─nvme0n1p5   ntfs         win10     5A09CA694B575624               

sudo fdisk -l: 
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB          
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 4DE7B4F0-1306-46D7-AE3C-B6845B6D60BF

Device             Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1      4096   1023998   1019903   498M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2   1024000   9412606   8388607     4G Microsoft basic data
/dev/nvme0n1p3   9412608 521412607 512000000 244.1G Linux filesystem
/dev/nvme0n1p4 968380464 976769070   8388607     4G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p5 521412608 968380415 446967808 213.1G Microsoft basic data

Partition table entries are not in disk order.

Disk /dev/mapper/cryptswap: 4 GiB, 4294442496 bytes, 8387583 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

Disk /dev/zram0: 16 GiB, 17179869184 bytes, 4194304 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

What are your thoughts?

2

Honestly!? I’d if I was doing this I’d reinstall windows as most guides are dedicated to installing linux while windows still exists on the system and if you run into error this would be the easiest way to find solutions if anything goes wrong after

3

sorry if this response seems a bit aggressive just re read the first words

4

I didn’t take it as aggressive smokey.

Not what I wanted to hear but I respect your opinion. Windows was a real bear to install. It’s the platform I know the least about and have the least experience with.

Hopefully someone else will share what I want to hear, that I can install EOS over my existing linux distro with relative ease without having to mess with Windoze. Maybe that is not the case which is why I asked. I’m hopeful others will chime in as well.

1 Like
5

mad i re read it and I just thought it sounded aggressive and I hate coming across like that, glafd you could see it for what it was which was my opinion

6

Yes, the Calamares installer has a “install alongside” option where you can choose the partition you want it to be installed on (p3 it sounds like) and leave the others (Windows) alone. You shouldn’t actually need to format p3 beforehand, the installer should be able to take care of that for you.

1 Like
7

I’m going to mark this as solved. Not sure if I should add that to the subject line or if that is even done on this forum. Thank you for that response BluishHumility. Grateful for your help.

8

Click on ... under the post you want to mark as solution and check the solution box.

9

Also thank you chickenf00t for the spelling correction. I noticed that after the fact. Grateful for your help.

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