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I have a Dell Inspiron 3580 that comes with a 128GB SSD and a 1TB Toshiba hard drive. After trying to install a duel boot with Win 10 Pro and Linux I see in Disk Management that Windows (C:) is on the 1 TB drive.
I can only boot into Win 10 and every thing works OK. I cannot find where Linux was installed to.
Question - How do I get Win 10 back to SSD drive without having to reinstall Win 10?
Well, the way that I would do it would be to manually partition the SSD with either a 100MB System Reserved partition marked as active if it is MBR booting in legacy BIOS mode or with a 100MB EFI System partition if it is GPT booting in UEFI mode. Then copy only the C: drive partition from the hard drive to the SSD. Then add the boot files needed to the system partition I manually created. I like using MiniTool Partition Wizard Free to copy partitions. Not many others would do it my way, though. Most would try using some like Macrium Reflect Free to try to clone the drive (or do a system image backup and restore).
I was reading that on the Dell Inspiron 3580 Linux Ubuntu comes preinstalled. In that case installing windows would wipe the boot loader and there is no way to boot into Linux anymore. The fix for that is to use EasyBCD Install EasyBCD, start it. Select the Linux/BSD tab. Click in the type list box, select Grub2; enter the name of the Linux distribution, choose automatically locate and load then click Add Entry. Reboot your computer. If Window 10 is on the 1TB HDD then that is were you installed it. I think Ubuntu would have been on the M.2
Thanks to all that replied.
Yes, I would like to install Linux to duel boot with Win 10.
I went to the "One Time Start Page" and ubuntu is the first on the list. When I click on it and it startup, it is to a testing memory.
How do I run Linux in a Virtual machine? And should I keep Win 10 on the 1 TB hard drive?
Yes you could run windows on the spin drive or transfer the OS to the SSD. How to Move OS to Another Drive
Now for the VM. First you'll need to download a VM. My personal pic is VMware Workstation 16 Free for non-commercial use. Then download the ISO for Ubuntu 21.04 Install VMWare then what this video. It'll show you step by step how it's done. He's doing Ubuntu version 20.04 but it the same process.
That's a little bit incorrect. First, you don't download the Virtual Machine. You download the hypervisor which connects the VM to the host operating system. Then you use the hypervisor to create the VM.
Second, there is no need to download a hypervisor if you have Windows 10 Pro because a hypervisor called Hyper-V is included with Windows 10 Pro.
Here is Tenforum's excellent VM tutorial:
Hyper-V virtualization - Setup and Use in Windows 10
If it were me, depending on what exactly I wanted to use Linux for, I would move Windows to the SSD and run Linux in a virtual machine. Either way, I think the improvement in performance in Windows by moving it to the SSD would outweigh any degradation of performance of Linus installed on the HDD vice the SSD.
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