Prepare for installation

Since very early in the history of Linux, people who wanted access to both Linux and Windows had the option of installing both OSes on a single drive. This dual boot arrangement would start with a Windows install, resize the main Windows partition, install Linux, and then GRUB (Linux’s Grand Unified Bootloader) would give you a nice menu where you could choose Windows or Linux.

In theory this should still work well nowadays, but since Windows 8, Microsoft’s boot manager and recovery partition structure have become much more complicated. And failing to install correctly (which could deny the user access to both Linux and Windows), or it could be failing to get the parameters correct for Windows, making it unbootable. Sadly it tends to be beginners that get bitten by these sort of catastrophic failures, and while bootloader issues don’t damage the rest of the data on the machine, panicked attempts to reinstall Windows, or to delete Linux, certainly do.