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SteamOS first, Windows 7 later?

Tags:
  • Windows
  • SteamOS
  • Dual Boot
  • Partitions
  • Windows 7
Last response: in SteamOS
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July 8, 2014 10:30:43 AM

I'm building an expensive gaming rig soon. The thing is, to save money, I'm going to exclude my HDD and Windows at the time of the intial build and buy them later.

I have two questions as to how SteamOS will react:
1. Will I have to reinstall SteamOS if I add a new hard drive later, after I've allocated the SSD I'm starting with to contain all SteamOS files? If not, how simple is it to reallocate the area where it saves games and programs from the SSD to the HDD?
2. Will SteamOS and Windows cooperate if I try and install Windows 7 Home Premium on the same machine on separate partitions in the SSD?

More about : steamos windows

Best solution

July 14, 2014 1:36:05 PM

Hello. I've been messing around with SteamOS on my desktop since it's been released. I currently have both Windows 8.1 and SteamOS installed on a single SSD. I also have 2 additional HDDs, each assigned to one of the OSs for the large game install files.

While I am by no means an expert on Linux, my setup is similar to what you're looking to do with your rig, and I've figured out a lot that might help you out.



To answer your questions succinctly:

1. No, you won't necessarily have to reinstall SteamOS, but reallocating the saved games is pretty complicated. It will requires extra partitioning that might make it more trouble than it's worth in the end.

2. SteamOS and Windows will work together fine. It wasn't as easy as I hoped it would be, especially since I tried to install Windows AFTER SteamOS. I only got them to work together without problems after doing a clean install of everything, installing Windows first and SteamOS afterward.

Basically, installing Windows after SteamOS is considerably more complicated than installing SteamOS after Windows, mainly due to the fact that Windows doesn't play nice with other OSs. It's not that big of a deal to reinstall SteamOS. With SteamOS being in beta and constantly being updated, it can't hurt to do a clean install of the most up to date version further down the line when you get Windows. Most games on Steam have the cloud save feature, so you won't lose anything you can't download again.



However, if you still want to go ahead and try installing Windows after SteamOS, I can go more in depth and walk through how I would do it. If you already know this stuff, you don't have to read through this:

While Windows installs everything on one partition, the standard SteamOS install creates 4 different partitions on your hard drive. Root, Recovery, Swap and Home. The first three partitions can be considered as where the OS is stored, and the Home partition is where all your downloaded games and programs will be installed.

Directhex, creator of Ye Olde SteamOSe, has a pretty in depth video on dual booting on his website that explains the partitioning process in more detail:

http://directhex.github.io/steamos-installer/

This also helps:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-dual-boot-steamos,re...



INSTALL WINDOWS AFTER STEAMOS

I'm assuming you'll want half your HDD for your SteamOS games and half for your Windows games. In your case, you'll first have to move the Home partition of SteamOS to your HDD to free up space for the Windows partition. While I never tried doing this myself, this guide might help in the process:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Mov...

After that, just install Windows normally onto the new SSD free space. Then partition the second half of your HDD as the D: drive or whatever. If you want to install all your programs to the HDD, change the default install path to the D: drive in the registry.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/window...

If you just want your steam games on the D: drive and all your other programs on the SSD, just install steam to the D: drive and all your games will install there by default. This is what I did, as I'd rather have chrome or whatever smaller programs boot faster off the SSD.

The only problem now is being able to choose which OS to boot into. Idk how much experience you have with dual booting, but the Windows bootloader will likely override the SteamOS bootloader (grub2), and it won't recognize SteamOS as an option on startup. You'll have to reinstall grub2 by either figuring out some way of booting back into SteamOS and use terminal commands in the desktop environment or using a recovery disk to reinstall grub2.



INSTALL STEAMOS AFTER WINDOWS

So yeah, it's a big pain to install Windows after SteamOS. If you decide to install SteamOS after Windows, Install Windows normally. Leave a little more than 30GB for the SteamOS system partitions Root, Recovery and Swap), then follow the expert install guide from directhex on dual booting. You don't have to use the SteamOS install file from his site, as Valve has incorporated his dual booting updates into the official SteamOS install file, so choose whichever one you want:

store.steampowered.com/steamos/download

During the expert install, create the Home partition on the free space of the HDD. He doesn't explicitly say you can do this, but that's what I did and it works fine. I don't think logical or primary partitions matter; you just can't have more than 4 primary partitions on your SSD. The grub2 bootloader will install automatically and override the windows bootloader, allowing you to choose which OS to boot on startup.



I know that was a lot to read, but hopefully that helps either you or anyone else looking to dualboot SteamOS and Windows.

I was tired of everyone on forums saying you can't dualboot SteamOS or you can't install SteamOS first without giving reasons as to why not. I know it's redundant to install both OSs on one PC since "Windows can do everything SteamOS can," but it's your computer you can do what you want with it! Don't let other people tell you what to do.

Sorry if I told you stuff you already knew. Good Luck. You can do it!
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