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In my HP notebook I'm currently running a 250GB SSD as a primary drive in dual-boot mode using GRUB (Linux Mint and Windows 10 with Windows being the default OS). There is a second classic HDD installed in my machine serving as a common "data" drive to both systems. The PC's BIOS says it's running as "Hybrid UEFI (with CSM)". The current system drive appears to be GPT-formatted (it's been a few years I set this up, so I'm not 100% sure). The drive currently holds 6 partitions (1x system/boot NTFS, 1x Windows NTFS, 4x Linux ext4/swap/extended partitions)

I'm now in a process to get me a bigger primary SSD drive in order to setup an additional Windows 10 as a third boot partition. Unfortunately there is no room to simply install a 3rd drive. So all three OSses will need to be installed onto that new drive.

Although I'd love to avoid it I could sort-of live with doing a complete new Linux installation, while I cannot risk to lose the current Windows installation. But as I'm doing al this with a new / separate SSD risk should be low. Also I'm maintaining Acronis system images of that.

My plan is to clone the old 250GB SSD to the new bigger SSD, leaving an additional partition free, then install the 2nd Windows 10 into the new empty partition

I already read up a bit here on superuser.com and elsewhere (like this topic here). But none seems to cover my situation.

Questions:

  1. is this a modest way to achieve my goals or is it possibly unnecessary complicated?
  2. will the new /additional Windows installation overwrite my GRUB setup pushing its own boot manager? If so: how can I prevent or repair that?
  3. what are the alternatives?
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  • UEFI or BIOS installs? All systems must be in same boot mode for grub to boot them. Some have created a temporally second ESP & run Windows repairs on second install, so It puts boot files into the second ESP. Then change ESP back to main ESP. Grub will find both FAT32, it does not care if one is not ESP & set up both Windows install in grub menu. Fast start up must be off on both Windows. You may have to manually edit BCD if you only want one in each BCD.
    – oldfred
    Commented Nov 27, 2020 at 3:38
  • sorry for answering late: I intend to do UEFI boots for all OSses. Not sure what ESP means in this context. nyway, meanwhile I solved ging a different way, see down in my own answer
    – Lothar Mueller
    Commented Dec 1, 2020 at 21:08

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So after trying what I layed out above, but without success I ended up with setting up the new drive from scratch then restore some partitions from Acronis/TrueImage backups. Still not quite there, but my main Windows system is up and running, the second Windows and Linux Mint are in their raw bootable states. Probably the best way to do this.

--- update ---

meanwhile I solved this differently: installed 2x Win10 on the new main hard drive then installed Linux on my now free old 250GB SSD and put it into an external USB 3enclosure- Not quite as fast as it would be if I could boot from an internal drive but still fast enough for me. Everything else I tried somehow didn't work

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