Possible to have Ubuntu Core installation alongside Ubuntu Desktop?

Charlee · January 20, 2025, 8:28am

Hey there,

Is it possible to have a dual-boot or live-boot of Ubuntu Core? I would really like to have an instance on my PC with which I can test stuff.

I tried doing the dd command to an external harddrive and that doesn’t seem to work (the installation starts but something must be going wrong in setting it up because it just keeps rebooting).

I haven’t tried doing dd to a partition on my harddrive because we generally give the root of the harddrive rather than the path to a partition (nvme0n1 vs nvme0n1p1), so I am assuming that it is not possible.

Is there any workaround? Or plans to do it?

Regards, Charlee

ogra · January 20, 2025, 11:40am

Dual booting is still not supported with Core and as you found Core needs the whole disk (because it partitions it in the initial install mode)…

I’d suggest using a VM instead …

Charlee · January 20, 2025, 11:55am

And booting of an external drive? I found out it’s not possible, but would be awesome if you could explain why

ogra · January 20, 2025, 12:37pm

It should actually be possible but i fear you’d have to switch your UEFI to always boot the external disk preferred. A shared EFI on the internal disk that chain-loads the external one will not work

Charlee · January 21, 2025, 1:32am

Dear @ogra,

I tried loading Ubuntu Core form an external drive disconnecting the internal harddrive (so for sure it is the only drive being loaded) but it still doesn’t work. I made a video of the logs. I made a few screenshots that I think capture important logs. This is a C-USB SSD btw.