auto-magic dual boot in linux mint gone

[dougal]

seems to me there was a change made where the first option during an install has been removed that allowed for dual boot automatically (see attachment). I thought it might have been changed in lm19 but checked it in 18.3 and it's not there either, though that's where i thought i remember seeing it from a previous install. i'm interested in this option for folks who are wanting to try linux while maintaining their familiar OS.

does anyone have any idea when this was changed, or a workaround for this situation?

the attachment is a screenshot of the option page and the following is a post that refers to this option back in mint 7:

....fortunately, there's an easy choice that will let you dual-boot both Windows and Mint. Simply pick the first option on the Installation Type menu: "Install Linux Mint alongside them."

This procedure will install Linux Mint next to your existing Windows system and leave it totally untouched. When I do this, I usually give half my PC's remaining drive space to Mint. You'll be asked to choose which operating system you want to boot by default. No matter which one you pick, you'll get a few seconds to switch to the other operating system.

[Jason]

It should still be there.

Now, mind you, it has to detect this other operating system, which if Windows or popular Linux distros, it will. If it's the Mac OS, I have no idea honestly. If it doesn't, you won't see this option.

If it's not seeing it then for some reason it isn't seeing the drive or partition that the original OS is on. This problem can also happen if there is more than one drive and it's selecting a secondary drive to do the install on. In that case you can use the Something else and do your partitioning, choosing the correct drive.

This link can help with custom partitioning (the 'Something Else' option).

[dougal]

thanks Jason:
this is on a hp tower with only 1 hdd connected and
it seemed to see things given it had offered this ;
the computer currently has windows7 on it .what would you like to do? and now since i erased the disk and installed linuxmint 19 cinnamon it detects that . but still no option to  install linuxmint19- mate alongside linuxmint19- cinnamon .
also with the 'alongside' option there was a simple GUI slider function for changing partition sizes and it created things like the swap partition ,etc...these made the process much easier for a first-time operator .

[Jason]

I'm not sure why you would want to dual boot LM 19 with another LM 19. So it may not be prepared for that but when you had just Windows 7 before, it should have picked that up. Not sure why it didn't. The easy slider would have shown when that was selected.

Maybe the drive is too small or there was too little space left before to put LM alongside Windows 7? You would probably need about 20 GB minimum free, maybe more when you consider the swap partition (equal to memory or memory x 2). Maybe that's the problem you're having now, too. If it's one of the original SDD drives, it could also be really small (64 GB, for example).

In any case, if you ever come across this again, step 2 at this link shows you how you can use the partitioning tool in Windows 7/8.x/10. It won't actually create the Linux partition but it can shrink the Windows one to make room for it.

[Jason]

After a bit of searching, I saw that (should have remembered it) that you can only have 4 primary partitions using traditional (non-GPT) mapping tables. Being an old system, it is likely that it doesn't use GPT so if were already 4 partitions on it, you'd have to get rid of at least one for it to work. Might not be the case but you never know.

[dougal]

thanks, i checked that out and i'm only seeing 1 partition on this dev/sda1 , 

also noticed in the article you sent the link to that they are showing the same option choices while detecting linuxmint sylvia installed, so it seems to be a common situation.  though they go on to say ;

If another operating system is present on the computer, the installer shows you an option to install Linux Mint alongside it. If you choose this option, the installer automatically resizes your existing operating system, makes room and installs Linux Mint beside it. A boot menu is set up to choose between the two operating systems each time you start your computer.

so i'm guessing that the screenshot is an oversight.

i'm reading in other sites about the problem but haven't seen anything that sounds like they know why it happens...so going to alternative installs via partitioning etc    seems to be the option to create dual booting.

[Jason]

If you look closer, it shows This computer has multiple operating systems on it. What would like you do? and Install Linux Mint alongside them was an option though it was not selected. I'm assuming you mean this screenshot from the Its FOSS article - this one, right?

[Jason]

Did you check the size of the drive?

[dougal]

 i'm a bit confused on this as this is the link i thot u sent above and i don't see this window about multi OSs installed:

https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html
(side note I can't seem to copy image and paste into this box)

the hdd has 320gb of space now with one primary loaded with lm19 cinnamon.  It recognizes the OS that's installed but doesn't give the option.
as for why i am trying to do this...it's to play with different flavors of mint to get a feel for cinnamon, mate and xfce. hoping to have a choice for any physical conditions i'm in eg. old laptops with 2gb, imac with 3gb, tower with 4gb ,towers with more than 4gb of RAM 

i have read that sometimes the installer won't recognize the already installed OSs whether windows, linux etc and have not found any workarounds or answers to this situation other than partitioning the hdd with something like Gparted which could be done thru the 'something else' option...this is the route i'll go but was moslty thinking of others who would like to try this on their equipment with less experience than I and more hesitation for fear of something going wrong .

[Jason]

My graphic was from the It's FOSS article, not the Linux Mint installation docs. I thought you referring to the FLOSS article. I haven't encountered this problem so not sure what's going on though I've never tried to have two different versions of Linux Mint on the same machine. It may be for that that you may have to custom partition.

I think the aim for people just trying them out is to just boot into Live mode and try it out there knowing it's going to be a bit slower, pick one and then install it.

But it most certainly should have recognized Windows in the case you had before. I've never seen that not happen before.

[Jason]

I put Windows 10 back on this laptop in order to see if the dual-boot option with Windows is still there for Linux Mint 19.


It is. I'm looking at in the install screen right now - 'Install Linux Mint alongside Windows 10'. As for installing other versions of LM 19 alongside each other, I don't know yet. I might check that later.

[dougal]

sorry Jason ,I thought I had mentioned more recently that the option has shown up at different times with windows or LMint already installed...still not sure why it doesn't recognize it at other times...thanks for checking into it and for the hdd ( bhodi was one of the distros i tried a couple of years ago to run on a netbook)   

[Jason]

No problem,Dougal. It had Bodbi on it, huh? I don't even remember the computer that drive came out of. Glad it still works.