¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Vou escrever o post completamente em inglês para treinar um pouco. Se você quiser me ajudar, não hesite em me apontar erros de gramática, ortografia ou eventuais stack overflows! Da série “só se aprende errando” e “é melhor escrever um pouco em vez de só ficar lendo”.

Nota 1: eu não perdi tempo utilizando google translate.

Nota 2: eu só vou corrigir meus próprios erros daqui a algum tempo, para ter noção do quanto eu evoluí daqui até lá. Então é provável que você encontre vários erros aqui, anyway. Sorry por isso.

In this post I’ll try to explain a particular way of setting up a Windows + Linux environment on a single PC.

First things first. You should firstly have in mind which version of Windows and which Linux distro you intend to install. Probably the windows question won’t be much difficult to answer, since there aren’t really that many versions of it, but the Linux and open source world is a world of choice: there are hundreds of distros to choose from! So, I’ll assume that you have already defined these. And I’ll assume that you only want to install a single distro.

Now, you should transfer your Linux ISO to a installation medium. From here, I’ll tell you a secret. This post is not intended to be a full tutorial. In these modern web days, you can find all the stuff you need just by yourself (DIY) and with a help of doctor Google. What google doesn’t really have, at least now – of course –, is the know-how of the things. That you can find here – at least a bit. So, use google and don’t complain at me. You’ll get smarter if you do so (I didn’t said more intelligent, I said smarter).

Now, let’s go back to our point. You need your ISO in a medium. What about using the dd command, Mr. expert? I’ll remember you how to do that:

sudo dd if=/path/to/your/iso.img of=/dev/sdb bs=4M && echo Wait && sync && echo OK

If you don’t know what I am talking about, please consider searching more information about dd. The GUI way of doing the same thing is to use programs like Lili USB Creator if you are in Windows, or Unetbootin if you are in GNU/Linux (this program is also available for Windows).

OK, now let’s boot into our distro. Configure your BIOS settings to do that. The option that you are searching for is something like “boot order” or “boot options” or “boot priority”. By the way, you should press some key in your keyboard while your system is booting up to have access to your BIOS.

Now, are you in the live environment of your distro? Good! But maybe you picked one like Arch Linux or Gentoo Linux so you don’t have a live environment at all…that doesn’t really matter. Let’s work.

You should begin partitioning your HDD. You can do it by several ways. This is the partitioning scheme that I recommend, supposing that you have a 500GB HDD (pretty common these days). You’ll use MBR (oh, don’t bother me with GPT). Create the following partitions:

• /dev/sda1 50GB NTFS (for our future windows)
• /dev/sda5 ext4 (logical) 50GB (for /)
• /dev/sda6 swap (logical) 3GB (for swap. This one is optional)
• The rest: /dev/sda2 NTFS (for /home and Windows Program Files and Documents)

Create these partitions either with gparted or with cfdisk.

Now go to the installation process of the distro that you picked and be alert to mount /, swap and /home on the places that you chosed.

You should install grub or grub2!

Now reboot your system and boot into the Windows installation medium. Follow the instructions from the wizard and install windows in the correct partition.

Now boot into Windows. You should notice that our grub was replaced by the default Windows bootloader, so we can’t boot into Linux again (at least now). This is why some people recommend to install Windows first. But I find the converse better. In Windows, you should create the “Program Files” folder in the big partition (/home) and make windows recognize it. Go to the registry editor (Win + R ==> regedit). Edit the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MicrosoftWindows\CurrentVersion\ProgramFilesDir to your newly created Program Files. Now: create some libraries.

(…)

Update(2026-08-21): Apparently some text is missing at the end 🤷. ∎