Windows and Linux On a Single Drive and Installing Linux First

I previously posted on how to dual boot between Windows and Linux with each on them on separate disks, but what if you only had one storage device?  This is also possible can be a bit more messy because Windows and Linux must share the same boot partition (the part of the storage with the instructions on how to boot the OS).

The common convention is the install Windows first and then install Linux.  Windows has a "you don't need any other OS" mentality so when it gets installed it doesn't care if you have another OS, it will change the boot sequence to boot itself and you'll need to go into the UEFI menu to boot into Linux.  Linux distributions, on the other hands, comes with a boot loader that offers a menu of all the OS so that you can choose which OS to boot.  So the common convention is to

1. Install Windows
2. Resize the storage partition to make room for Linux to install.
3. Install Linux

What you end up with is that when you boot up, you'll see the Linux boot manager with the options to pick either Linux or Windows.

What happens when you install Linux first and then Windows?  Since Windows doesn't have a boot manager, it will just tell your system to boot directly into Windows.  To restore the Linux boot manager on older systems (BIOS-based), you'll need to use your Linux recovery disk and restore the boot manager (Windows mostly likely did NOT delete your Linux disk unless you installed windows on top of where you installed Linux).  

The general process is pretty similar:

1. Create a partition for Linux and Windows (just like Windows create a new partition from an existing one later)
2. Install Linux
3. Install Windows
4. Change the boot order back to Linux through the UEFI menu or efibootmgr tool (for UEFI systems) or use the Linux recovery disk (for BIOS)

On newer UEFI systems, the boot manager pointing to all the OS is still there in the boot partition but Windows only just changed it to boot its section.   You can generally change this back by going into your motherboard's UEFI menu on or on Linux you can use the efibootmgr tool to make the change.