Dualboot Set-Up Assistance

Post date: 2021-04-15 15:04:47

After putting a new SSD in my PC I installed Linux Mint & Windows 10 on it with the intention of using the old HDD as storage. Installation went well, but after mucking with stuff I ended up deleting the Linux partitions, assuming a reinstall would make it easier to avoid the issues I created and give me an opportunity to set things up better.

The SSD is 480G. Currently there are 4 partitions, 230G allocated for Windows C:, 500M for recovery, 100M for EFI, and 217G unallocated for Linux. The HDD is 1T and set up as Windows D:, NTFS. Both Windows and Linux only need one user account.

Problem 1: Using the HDD with Linux. After looking at a lot of tutorials and how-tos about this sort of thing, I've sort of gotten all turned around on it. In general I would like to have Linux recognize it as a read-write storage device, same as Windows recognizing it as D: and offering it as a save location. Can Linux share the unpartitioned HDD, or is it better to partition that as well and set it as /Home (Or whatever is appropriate)? I had partitioned it when I first installed Linux and the OS recognized it, but only as read, not read-write.

Problem 2: Windows has D: set as the storage for SteamLibrary; I would like Steam on Linux to access and use these files as well. Again, I've read about Symlinks and Virtual Machines to the point where I'm just going around in circles.

Problem 3: On my original install I didn't give enough room to on the SDD to Linux and /Root quickly filled up with Timeshift files. I shrunk down the Windows C: partition to make more room for Linux, but now I don't know if it would be better to put /Root onto the HDD or if I could just direct Timeshift to store its files on the HDD - and if so, how to do that (The HDD is old and I realize it's goofy to store recovery files on old media).

Silly Problem 4: When both OSes were installed I noticed that every time I logged into Windows 10 the clock needed to be reset. Is this something that happens with Dual Boot (Linux was set up as the default OS) or did I screw something up after my Windows 10 install when I went on a cruft-deletion spree and this indicates possibly a more fundamental issue?

Please click Here to read the full story.