Are you dual booting off one hard drive(two or more partitions) or two hard drives with an operating system on one and one on the other hard drive?

My dual-boot machine has one HDD with five partitions (four primary occupied by Windows 7 just because it can and one extended occupied by Mageia).

yes

Love your answer syg00, just as meaningless as my signature.

No offence intended, I'm just having difficulty in trying to stop smiling...

Play Bonny!

On my non-UEFI ThinkPad X201, I am dual booting Arch&Debian from a single btrfs filesystem (subvolumes FTW!); there are also three live ISO images (Fedora 22, Kali & Xubuntu 15.10) that I can boot from the hard drive via GRUB.

So that's five systems and no partition table.

I go alongside syg00, but instead my answer is: "No"

And it is truthful/accurate: I don't dual boot.

When I did dual-boot, I did it from two hard drives. I don't anymore though, except on this laptop, which has a tiny Windows partition on the same hard drive.

The other reason why this thread caught my attention:

"Make sure they do twenty paces before they start the duel"

"Duel booting?" Hmmm... First, both laptops face away from each other. Then, they take twenty paces ...

Seriously ... "why bother?" Buy a copy of VMWare (unless you really want to monkey-around with Virtualbox ...), and a USB or FireWire-attached external disk drive. Let either operating system be "the host." Install alternate operating systems on the external drive(s). Problem solved. Microprocessors have on-chip support for virtualization.

Consider getting an external monitor (you know you've always wanted one ...) and dedicating it to the virtual machine when it is running.

"Kernel Panic" is downright easy to solve when it pops up in a window.

Until recently I was duel booting on one hard drive with two partitions, never really had the opportunity to duel boot with two HDs. @sundialvcs: I think both VMs and partitioning have their places, but, if you are willing. We can duel on the issue.

Heh.

Honestly, I used to think that dual-booting was necessary, but now that Intel has "gotten really good at" building virtualization into their chip designs ... and since external disks have become so fast and so cheap ... I no longer see a pragmatic need for it.

Hell, another thing that you can also do ... is to boot from(!) that external disk drive. I fully expect that any computer you're likely to buy today is capable of booting from an attached external device. (So, you literally could have equal access to both options: boot directly from the external disk, and/or point a VM-definition at it.)

Today I was in an office-supply store and I saw a terabyte external drive on sale for $85.00 (USD).

Ain't hardware wunnerful?

I would agree with you that dual booting isn't necessary, but I still think it can be handy. Sometimes, hauling an external HD around with you just doesn't cut it! Also, I think you can gain more power from your computer if you aren't using virtualization as all of your computers resources are devoted to one operating system, not two at once. So, I will continue to use both VMs, and dual boot, as the need arises.

Yah, HARDWARE IS WUNNERFUL!

Guys,

If there any performance difference, if we have a dual boot Machine or having single OS with any kind of virtualization software installed in it?

I'm curious instead if people have Linux machines where they run Windows within a VM on it.

In my world the only reasons to use Windows are to run specific programs which only gel best with Windows, such as MS Office; or if I need to develop Windows applications as part of my job. As much as Linux is great, I cannot edit and work on documents made by Office by other people and not end up altering those documents where my colleagues will not complain at me. And I don't try to create Windows applications using anything but their own native tools.

Instead I have multiple systems, one where it's Linux only, one where it's Windows only, and now one that is MAC OS only.

I keep teetering on starting a new thread in Non-Nix/General asking whether or not people think multi-boot is anything worthwhile these days. Same thoughts on VM's. I only use VM's to try distros out. Once I know if I like it or not I am not interested in running on VM all the time, instead I'll install and use it, and then use it all the time. I'm thinking that running Windows in a VM would be difficult; for me. They license their stuff and I'd have to figure out the requirements or search for something which could run in a VM. Work that I don't need to do because I have it booting already on a machine.

I don't have time to boot and reboot computers everyday.

While I get it that people don't have multiple computers all the time, I also feel that there are many people out there re-using old hardware with Linux.

There's another thread where the OP started it about 2-3 weeks ago and they're asking for size recommendations at installing 3 OS's on a 240G SDD and meanwhile they have a 3TB external. I'm looking at that, seeing that they've iterated on this for a few weeks, but they haven't apparently moved ahead.

Sorry I know I'm ranting a bit here...

All my computers are laptops so it's a single disk with multiple partitions for me. All of mine have Windows (some flavor) and Linux and a large ntfs partition for generic storage that either OS can use. I don't use Windows much anymore; however, there are still of few things it's necessary for - like Turbotax and Winamp...