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Windows / Android Dual Boot Phones

posted by janrinok on Friday March 14 2014, @01:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-that-the-sound-of-desperation-that-I-hear dept.

skullz writes:

"Hot on the heels of Microsoft easing up access to the Windows Phone OS are rumors of dual Windows / Android phones, able to boot into either OS.

The narrative so far is Android for personal use, Windows for BYOD to the office. I can see a company locking down a Windows Phone install so it can connect to Exchange and the company wifi but what would the two OSs share? Contacts and pictures? Would a bit of malware on one OS be isolated from the other?

It used to be that you would dual boot your Windows box with Linux, now that trend has reversed itself for your mobile. How far we have come."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday March 14 2014, @04:20PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Friday March 14 2014, @04:20PM (#16614)

    If you frequently NEED switch back and forth you end up needing things that are on the other OS. Shut down, reboot, rinse repeat.
    That gets to be so frequent you end up mounting windows partitions under Linux, only to find the you've corrupted the file system, or created incompatible files.

    I have a triple-boot Windows 7, XP, and Xubuntu setup. I keep the majority of my files that I want to get at on an NTFS partition. This works perfectly fine and without corruption (well, except for line endings, obviously, but just open the file in Wordpad and save.) The closest I've come to FS corruption is when I occasionally resize a Windows partition or the big NTFS file store partition, then the next time I boot Windows, it runs the CHKDSK equivalent on the part and says everything's fine.

    Your partitioning scheme quickly reveals itself to have been a bad choice.

    Well...it depends. Your first time or two, yeah, probably. I have a setup I'm satisfied with, although I'll admit it's a wee bit convoluted. There's supposedly ext3 (and reiser?) drivers for Windows, but I found the easier way is to put any data I want to get at from both systems on NTFS. For any partitions I don't *want* Windows to see (the Linux install), I use whatever Linux filesystem as applicable.

    Any though of backup goes out the window, because you now need to do it twice.

    I'm not quite sure what you mean by this...with the right FS types (as above) I don't see why it would be a problem.

    Then you find out that one OS nukes the other upon install.

    Windows nukes the MBR, sure. And GRUB2 is a lot harder to fix that with than legacy GRUB, sadly. So you just make sure to install the Linux system last, or dd the MBR somewhere and restore it after the Windows install via live CD. But other than that, there shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't say to use the entire disk during the install procedure, even for Windows.

    Although granted, I would never recommend a newbie try setting up a dual boot on their own. That's just a recipe for disaster, but after my first 2 or 3 times I haven't had much trouble.

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