By Sherif Atitebi | July 06, 2026
I use Windows. Microsoft has me in a comfortable little chokehold and I made peace with that a long time ago.
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Then I decided I wanted Linux too. Not instead of Windows, but next to it, on the same laptop, on a second SSD. Dual boot. Everyone online had the same warning: touch this wrong and BitLocker will throw a recovery screen at you and you'll spend the night hunting for a key you never wrote down.
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I am new to this. So naturally I went straight for the setup people say to be careful with.
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1. Picking a distro (and overthinking it)
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The first hour was just me staring at distro names like I was ordering off a menu in a language I don't speak. I landed on Ubuntu because that's what everyone tells a beginner to land on, and I've learned to stop fighting good advice.
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I flashed the ISO to a USB stick and told myself the hard part was over. It was not the hard part. The hard part had not even shown up yet.
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2. The SSD that refused to exist
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I got into the Ubuntu installer, opened manual partitioning, and my second SSD was just not there. The drive I bought specifically for this. Invisible.
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Turns out my laptop had VMD enabled in the BIOS, which basically hides the drives from Linux. I disabled it, rebooted, and there it was. The relief was genuinely a little embarrassing.
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▸ Disable VMD in the BIOS
▸ Reboot into the installer
▸ Suddenly your drive appears like it was never gone
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3. The install that broke on camera
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I sorted the partitions, hit install, sat back, and watched it fail with an rsync error mid-way through. Zero bytes copied. Just a wall of red text and me, quietly reconsidering my choices.
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I kept all of that in the video. No point pretending it went smoothly when it very much did not. I sorted the media, tried again, and this time it actually finished.
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4. First boot, and the payoff
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The GRUB menu came up on boot. Linux at the top, Windows one click below it. Both alive. Neither one screaming about a recovery key.
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Linux is my priority OS now. But Windows is right there in the menu whenever the chokehold tightens again.
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Wrapping up
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Nobody warns you that most of dual booting is just sitting there googling error messages and trusting that it'll work eventually. The BitLocker horror story never even happened to me. The real fight was a hidden drive and a broken installer.
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If you want the full mess, the failures included, I filmed the whole thing here: https://youtu.be/__3MAR2wRMw
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Turns out the scariest part was never BitLocker. It was believing the second SSD was actually still in the laptop.