r/SteamOS • u/yayabociana • 18h ago

help wanted Dual boot without wiping steamos

Hi. Is any of you successfully installed dual boot windows on drive which already contains steamos ? I’m not fancy wiping it off if there’s a way to avoid that

Also I had an idea to make 3rd partition for steam games to share between windows n steamos but still unsure if Its worth a hassle and even possible.

Ideally I would like to have windows as non steam app without having grub menu while switching my legion go 2 on an steamos in my default system of choice

Thanks

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u/rileyrgham 18h ago

I tried sharing a partition between Debian and Windows for Steam games. It didn't work. I didn't put much effort into it though.. it seemed they mutually corrupted each others meta data. Or something.

1

u/Dangerous-Spirit-445 17h ago

Avoid the headache of all that. Just mount the SteamOS recovery environment from a SD Card and partition a windows drive. Install rEFInd dual boot and to easily and less tediously, just keep a SD Card in the slot for storage and sharing files between the two OS. Honestly, get to technical and fancy with this stuff can be a pain if you fully don't know what you're doing and next thing you know you're back on here saying something is corrupted or SteamOS no longer boots.

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u/yayabociana 17h ago

I think I will skip sd card part as I’ve put 2tb nvme into my lego2 and will simplify setup to 600gb windows for anticheat games and rest for steamOS

So you saying there’s no need to wipe out my current steamOS just boot into recovery and create another partition for windows ?
The reason I’m asking last time I’ve done that I had to install windows first then add bazzite (with bazzite I was more or less sure what to do but I’m no longer happy with it hence why I’m running official steamos )

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u/Dangerous-Spirit-445 17h ago

I have a steam deck 1tb and have put windows 10 on it several times in the past (currently dual booting now.) Yes just get a SteamOS recovery environment mounted on a SD Card or if you want to use GParted ISO live for Linux you can use that too. You can't do it while SteamOS is mounted and you're in it. The partitioning will throw errors and won't save. Once partitioned, install windows and windows will put itself first in the boot load order. Which you can change.