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Cake day: February 20th, 2025

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  • Theres a lot of bad suggestions in the replies so I’ll provide another upvote for getting a cheap second drive (crucial has a 256 ssd for $20), installing Linux on a second disk like that is simplest. Once it’s installed, Linux can mount the original windows drive natively (the reverse is not true, which is unfortunate but makes sense given the market share of each of the different disk formats like ext3/4, btrfs, zfs, etc…windows just uses ntfs and Linux supports that). If your main drive is encrypted you will need the recovery key so make sure you grab that first (google bitlocker recovery key).

    You might say “you’re ignoring the idea that some people have a laptop” but honestly Linux itself kinda ignores that idea in a lot of cases. In that case you’d likely have to have windows shrink your main partition by ~50+100gb and then do a dual boot which is a little more annoying.