Dual Booting Ubuntu and Ubuntu

[Atlantean]

Greetings everyone,

I am new to this forum and fairly new to Linux. I have used both Ubuntu and Fedora before as everyday machines and have found solutions to common problems such enabling repositories and installing missing drivers, but I would not consider my proficiency as anything beyond beginner level.

As the title of this thread suggests I would like to set up a machine (an intel nuc) with two separate installations of ubuntu 20.04 on two different hard drives. The reason is that I want to have one for my day to day use, with a few games, random browsing and also for work, while the other would be a "secure" environment, mostly for online banking. I want both installations to be encrypted, each with its own key. The questions I have are:

1 - How to set up this properly?

2 - Would that be truly secure? As I understand the installations would never be 100% separate from each other as the bootloader has to be installed in just one of them and used for both (am I correct?)

Your input will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Sudo It]

I think you will be fine. For the second question, yeah, you will be fine. Since you are encrypting both hard drives with different keys, one os wont see what other os contents are.

 

[Terminal Velocity]

But encrypted installation asks for the key before GRUB... I never tried it but I think you can't have more than one encrypted installations in one computer.

 

[Atlantean]

But encrypted installation asks for the key before GRUB... I never tried it but I think you can't have more than one encrypted installations in one computer.

Yes, thank you, this is the sort of thing I have no idea about.

As a matter of fact I already have one of the installation up and running, the general purpose one. I hoped it would be a matter of adding the second drive and installing Ubuntu on it, but I could also reinstall the whole shebang if necessary. There is, of course, the question of whether this is possible at all. I just saw too much potential for me to screw things up or waste a bunch of time, and so decided to ask those more knowledeable than me.

 

[Alexzee]

Yes, thank you, this is the sort of thing I have no idea about.

As a matter of fact I already have one of the installation up and running, the general purpose one. I hoped it would be a matter of adding the second drive and installing Ubuntu on it, but I could also reinstall the whole shebang if necessary. There is, of course, the question of whether this is possible at all. I just saw too much potential for me to screw things up or waste a bunch of time, and so decided to ask those more knowledeable than me.

Just make sure during your second installation of Ubuntu that you have the correct HDD selected so the installer will do it's job.

After the second installation of Ubuntu finishes boot into the first instance of Ubuntu that you installed and update Grub.

sudo update-grub

 

[Atlantean]

Just make sure during your second installation of Ubuntu that you have the correct HDD selected so the installer will do it's job.

After the second installation of Ubuntu finishes boot into the first instance of Ubuntu that you installed and update Grub.

sudo update-grub

Thank you. May I ask how this will handle the drives' encryption? Will each drive then have its own bootloader partition?

 

[Alexzee]

Thank you. May I ask how this will handle the drives' encryption? Will each drive then have its own bootloader partition?

Yes each drive will have it's own bootloader partition and before the distro boots you will be prompted for the encryption code. Make sure you write that code down in more than one place.

When Grub boots you should have 2 entries that say Ubuntu.
To boot into the other Ubuntu installation just use the down arrow button and select it in Grub.

 

[Atlantean]

That's great. Thank you!

 

[Condobloke]

All that sounds very complicated to me. Doable, etc but maybe overkill?

Encrypting a drive slows it down, fwiw

Another method to completely separate baking business etc from a 'main' installation is to use a "live" cd or usb stick

You will have used one of these to install Ubuntu.

Insert the usb stick...reboot the pc......alter the boot order so that the pc boots from the usb stick.

Access your banking etc etc and do what you have to do, then shut down the pc and withdraw the usb stick.

All info entered is gone ....completely. You could not retrieve it even if you wanted to.

Why do you need your work, few games etc etc drive to be encrypted?

 

[Alexzee]

That's great. Thank you!

You're welcome.

 

[Atlantean]

All that sounds very complicated to me. Doable, etc but maybe overkill?

Encrypting a drive slows it down, fwiw

Another method to completely separate baking business etc from a 'main' installation is to use a "live" cd or usb stick

You will have used one of these to install Ubuntu.

Insert the usb stick...reboot the pc......alter the boot order so that the pc boots from the usb stick.

Access your banking etc etc and do what you have to do, then shut down the pc and withdraw the usb stick.

All info entered is gone ....completely. You could not retrieve it even if you wanted to.

Why do you need your work, few games etc etc drive to be encrypted?

Well, I also have important work documents and personal pictures and videos, nothing top-secret or X-rated, but if the device gets stolen I don't want thieves to have access to my privacy. I think it's good practice for laptops. Granted that the nuc is a desktop that stays mostly at home, but it's pretty portable and it does get moved occasionally.

As to having two installations being overkill, well, I used to live abroad and had an account with a bank that required me to install a "security module" called Warsaw. It requires top privileges and basically takes control of your machine, running in the background all the time, I guess monitoring your network connections. It does slow your machine quite a lot, and for all practical purposes it's a piece of spyware, so a separate machine was a must. I no longer have that bank account and no longer have to use that, so using a live USB is feasible and actually not a bad idea at all. I guess I just focused on setting up a separate installation because of that previous experience I had.

 

[KGIII]

so a separate machine was a must.

For future reference, stuff like that may run in a virtual machine. That's a separate OS you can use only when you need to, not slowing your computer down except when you're using the virtualized OS.

 

[Atlantean]

stuff like that may run in a virtual machine

I just did a search and some people have indeed managed to run Warsaw in VM, but the thing seems a bit fiddly to get to run in Linux at all, despite the fact that it comes as a .deb package as well. In any case I'm just glad I don't have to use it anymore.