This is inconvenient and you’ll probably have two operating systems installed on the same drive, so that’s where a boot manager comes in. If each operating system is installed to a separate drive, you could actually switch between both by selecting a different drive as your boot device every time you boot.

RELATED: 5 Ways To Try Out and Install Ubuntu On Your Computer Switching Between Operating Systems The downside is you can only use one of your installed operating systems at a time. You don’t have to deal with the overhead of a virtual machine, which is especially bad when it comes to 3D graphics. You could use virtual machine software instead of setting up a dual-boot system, but a dual-boot system lets you actually use both operating systems on your hardware at full, native speed. Windows also has its own boot loader, which can be used to select between different versions of Windows if you have more than one installed. Grub loads instead of the Windows boot loader at boot time if Windows was already installed, allowing you to choose the operating system you want to boot. When you install a Linux distribution, it typically installs the Grub boot loader. The point is you’re devoting part of the drive to one operating system and part of the drive to another.) (In reality, many operating systems use multiple partitions. By p artitioning the drive into several different partitions, you can have one partition for one operating system and another partition for another operating system, splitting the drive between them. RELATED: Beginner Geek: Hard Disk Partitions ExplainedĮven if you only have a single hard drive, you can have multiple operating systems on that hard drive. You could also boot an operating system - like a live Linux system or a Windows To Go USB drive - from external storage media. There’s no limit to the number of operating systems you he installed - you’re not just limited to a single one. You could put a second hard drive into your computer and install an operating system to it, choosing which hard drive to boot in your BIOS or boot menu.

Your computer’s operating system is generally installed on its internal hard drive. When you boot your computer, the BIOS loads the boot loader from the hard drive and the boot loader boots the installed operating system.

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