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Last active February 23, 2025 23:59
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Dual Booting Windows and Linux Mint with Separate EFI Partition
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Dual Booting Windows and Linux Mint with Separate EFI Partition.md

Dual Booting Windows and Linux Mint with Separate EFI Partition

  1. In Windows, open Disk Management and shrink your system partition.

  2. Download Linux Mint and flash it on the USB Flash Drive with Rufus or use a multiboot utility like Ventoy.

  3. Keep the flash drive plugged in and restart.

  4. Open your BIOS settings and set the boot priority to your flash drive.

  5. Boot into Linux Mint live CD

  6. Open terminal

  7. Open fdisk

$ sudo su -
$ fdisk -l

  1. Find the drive where your Windows installation resides. It should be something like /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1. Copy the path to clipboard.

  2. Open another terminal window and run parted and paste the drive path (ex. /dev/nvme0n1)

$ sudo su -
$ parted /dev/nvme0n1
  1. Type p to print a list of all partitions in the drive.
(parted) p
  1. Disable the boot flag from Windows EFI system partition
(parted) set 1 boot off
  1. Type p to print the partition list and verify that the boot flag is now gone, then type q to quit.
(parted) p
(parted) q

  1. Open the Install Linux Mint installation setup on the desktop to start the install.

  2. Tick the Install multimedia codecs checkbox. If secure boot is enabled on your BIOS, make sure to set the password for it for the MOK Enrollment that will happen after the install.

  3. In Installation type page, select Something else then click Continue.

  4. Scroll down and find the free space you gained when you used the Disk Management in Windows. Select it and click the plus button.

  5. Create the EFI boot partition for Linux Mint with the following settings:

Size: 512 MB
Type: Primary
Location: Beginning of this space
Use as: EFI System Partition

18: Create the swap partition for Linux Mint with the following settings. Relace 16384 with the value you_ram_size_in_gb * 1024.

Size: 16384 MB
Type: Primary
Location: End of this space
Use as: swap area
  1. Create the root partition for Linux Mint with the following settings:
Size: <all the remaining free space left> MB
Type: Primary
Location: Beginning of this space
Use as: Ext4 journaling file system
Mount point: /

  1. In the Device for boot loader installation, select the EFI boot partion we created for Linux Mint in step #17. Click Install Now and click Continue

  2. Once the install is finished, click Continue Testing and return to the terminal.

  3. Go back into parted and enable the boot flag for Windows EFI system partition

(parted) set 1 boot on
(parted) p
(parted) q

  1. Reboot computer

  2. If secure boot is enabled in your BIOS, proceed with the MOK Enrollment.

  3. Once inside the newly installed Linux Mint, open the terminal.

$ sudo su -
  1. Edit /etc/default/grub file
# nano /etc/default/grub
  1. Scroll to the bottom and add the following line then save:
GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false
  1. Run os-prober to locate the Windows Boot Manager
# os-prober
  1. Update the grub configure to include the Windows Boot Manager
# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  1. Restart computer. Windows should now appear alongside Linux Mint in the grub boot list.

Source

How To Dual Boot Linux Mint And Windows Safely - Avoid Boot Issues

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