RecalBox X86_64,Ubuntu,Windows10 Triple Boot

[Javier Sandoval]

Hello guys, so after installing recalbox on pc to test it out, i really liked and wanted to create a triple boot enviroment so i could still use my computer normally, and change to recalbox whenever i wanted to, but use ubuntu to transfer files betewn recalbox and windows easy. Im not a good with tutorials, but i did followed a couple of old tutorials i used in the past to triple boot kodi. anyway in short, what i did was, i installed recalbox on a 1tb hardrive, to do this, i did the same way as i did before, i used a computer with windows on it, loaded the harddrive as second, deleted the partition in windows, used radkil image writer to write the recalbox image into the harddrive, turned off the pc and remove the first harddrive and let the pc boot recalbox, once the instalation was done, i shut down the pc again, reconect the first drive, turned on windows, loaded the ubuntu usb distro on a usb drive, reboted into that, once loaded, i used gparted to shrink the share partition on recalbox from 900gb to 320gb, with the rest of the space i created another partition for windows ntfs, a swap partiotion and an ext4 partition for ubuntu, i installed ubuntu , let it reboot, once installed i reboot back into the first hardrive to have acces to windows, once there i instaled windows 10 with a tool from hirensbootcd, rebooted the pc, let the windows install go on, once finished, i removed the first harddrive as i was not going to use it anymore, booted the ubuntu instalation usb, repiared the boot with ubuntu to have grub2 back again, i modified the grub entry for recallbox , once finished i rebooted and voala, it worked, 3 systems in one pc. After i instaled burg for a more pretty boot enviroment, and im done. Now i can use windows to donload roms and just boot into ubuntu to transfer those roms to the share partition, and more. Now if you guys are interested i can help a bit so you can set up something similar. good day.

[Substring]

@javier-sandoval Hi

This is not something I have done the way you mentionned in your topic nor something I will do, but I'd say there are several ways to do it. @rockaddicted may share his experience too

The easy method

I'd use 1 HD per OS for quite many reasons :

• each hard drive has its own OS
• you don't mix partition types on a same HD
• less chances that you make a mistake

Now, to easily boot between each OS, just select the hard drive you want to boot on from the BIOS ^^ Nothing more, nothing less !

The less easy method

I'd still go with 1 HDD per OS, but I'd edit the bootloader of the 1st HDD to be able to boot to others. Windows 10 can do that through BCD (but, to be honnest, it's quite complicated to do it through command line, give a go to visual editoers).

Grub (which is shipped with Ubuntu) can do that rather easily too, but I'm not really familiar on editing grub to boot OSes. But it's still simplier than Windows. In other words, if you install Ubuntu, you could easily configure it to boot to other OSes (yeah, really, I do mean it). Though I don't have Recalbox on my home PC, that's how I boot : boot on my Ubuntu HDD that has grub, select the OS from here.

The definitely not easy way

Here, we mean not to use 1 HDD per OS, but try to "optimize" all that. To be honnest, I wouldn't go that way for maaaaaaaaany reasons unless you're quite familiar with partitionning hard drives, and mostly Linux drives. And you'd also need to leave some space behind the 2 Recalbox partitions, as Recalbox will use that free space and make a partition from it for user data.

One important thing to note : I have no idea if you can boot EFI on a partition other than the first one on the HDD. this may be also quite dependant on the bootloader that is used (grub starts to be really rusty ...)

[rockaddicted]

Hello, perso je ne me suis pas pris la tête pour faire mon dualboot ubuntu/recalbox.
J'ai recyclé un vieux HDD interne pour faire installation de recalbox.
Donc 1HDD ubuntu et un autre recalbox.
Etant donné que j'avais déjà grub d'installé, au boot, une fois sous grub je suis allé dans l'invite de command de grub via c.
Un coup de ls pour voir mes HDD connectés, puis ls (hdX,msdosX) et ls (hdX,msdosX)/ pour identifier la partition boot de mon disque dur recalbox. (hd2,msdos1) dans mon cas.

Une fois sous ubuntu j'ai édité le fichier /etc/grub.d/40_custom pour ajouter mon HDD recalbox dans le menu grub :

#!/bin/sh
exec tail -n +3 $0
# This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries.  Simply type the
# menu entries you want to add after this comment.  Be careful not to change
# the 'exec tail' line above.

menuentry "Recalbox 64Bits" {
	set root='hd2,msdos1'
	linux /boot/bzImage label=RECALBOX console=tty3 quiet loglevel=0
	initrd /boot/initrd.gz
}

un coup de sudo update-grub et reboot.

[Javier Sandoval]

No french here, as i wont be able to help like that, i prefer the one disk method, having multiple disks in one pc looks like a waste of money wich in my country cant really happen.

[Javier Sandoval]

Also for folks that like kodi, they can instal the most recent version of kodi instead of ubuntu, or maybe 4 systems in one....

[rockaddicted]

Haha didn't realize that is was writing in french...
Will write in English later.