My present setup now is linux mint with windows 10 in virtual machine with photoshop and NIK color efex pro installed inside photosop- all are working well- and I just recently was able to map my second hard-drive so both linux and windows can access it (it’s where i save my photos after working on them in photoshop) Everything is working well- but like i said- I would really like to run a separate non virtual machine version of windows 10 just for games/windows software-
I’ve thoguht about trying out a ‘Hard-Drive switch” which physically switches hard-drives via a knob- and do things this way, but there’s so little room in my comptuer case that I’m not sure I could mount hte hard-drive solidly and securely enough- this might be the best way to do it if i can figure out how- but for now I’m just gonna use my main HD for both if possible
Then you’ll have to partition your hard drive. One side for Linux and one for Windows. You won’t be able to switch between them without rebooting. Not sure about mint, but the SuSE boot loader was able to boot from either partition, back when I had a Windows partition.
Hard-Drive switch
Interesting. I had trouble with my desktop a few months ago. Ended up buying a new HD and installing my Win7 image to keep all my programs.
The old drive got scattered in a power surge (even though I have a APC). The shop got it working again and I used it to upgrade to Win10. I didn’t really care for Win10.
Now, I manually have to power down, switch drives, and power back up.
I didn’t realize — never thought about it — that there were Hard-Drive switches. Am looking on Newegg now.
Put your VM’s on external drives and run them via USB3. Makes everything super easy. Speed diff is not substantial depending on your hardware. (I am posting from a mint external drive. Speed tests I have run on this setup come in within 10% of running internal SATA.)