I would like to have dual boot of two Linux distributions on my laptop.One stable (Mint 18 that I found to work well with Yoga 3 Pro) and one that would be probably changing often (I want to try different distros like Fedora or OpenSuse, without destroying my stable working environment).I wonder how I should do partitioning of boot partitions here. I would like to do it in the easiest possible way that would allow to remove second Linux easily.I was thinking about having two boot partitions, one for each Linux.During installation of main Linux I could choose to put boot loader into MBR, and for second one into the proper partition. But then I would have to update Mint's grub everytime I install new test distro, would that be a good solution? Also I am not sure if I can have two EFI partitions.What would be the most stable and safe option here?Update 1First of all I did more research and realized that I was confused about few things. I didn't know that Device for boot loader installation [1] option during Mint installation is completely ignored during installation in UEFI mode [2] (1). Also poor naming in Ubuntu installer (2) made me believe that ESP is doing the job of /boot partion, not the MBR.Knowing that I am thinking of following partition scheme (256GB SSD drive):Scheme:/dev/sda1   EFI System Partition   fat32    /boot/efi    512MB    (ESP partion)/dev/sda2                          ext2     /boot        512MB    (boot for Mint)/dev/sda3                          ext2                  512MB    (boot for other)/dev/sda4                          lvm2    ( / for each Linux, shared home, swap )And then during installation of each Linux I would make 4 mounting points of correct partitions:/boot/efi/boot/swapIs that reasonable? And do I understand correctly that option for choosing Device for boot loader installation during Mint installation is redundant in EFI mode and I should not worry about it anymore? And do I understand correctly that now shared ESP will just have a config to start loading GRUB from a boot partition it got set up as default?Update 2I am going with a scheme I proposed above. However creating partitions /dev/sda1 - /dev/sda3 through GParted resulted in some errors in Mint installer. I repeated the process by destroying this partitions and creating them again from a Mint installer and it went smooth. /dev/sda4 I created before running Mint installer in GParted and created local volumes from terminal. This tutorial on LVM was very helpful on that [4].Update 3After installing Mint I proceed with installing Fedora (3), after that system by default booted into Fedora but in Bios I was able to choose Ubuntu or Fedora and each of them worked well.I change in BIOS to boot first from Mint and then from Mint I executedsudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfgwhich allows me basically to boot both Linuxes now.And because I made assumption that other Linux is for testing purpose I more or less achieved what I wanted. If I will remove Fedora and install in its place for example OpenSuse I could probably simply execute above command again to obtain stable boot system.Comments(0) I am keeping that question updated all the time just in case some one may find it useful in the future.(1) I did installation on a different computer some time ago that had two hard drives (separate devices). /dev/sda was fully meant for Windows 10 and I wanted to install Mint on /dev/sdb. Despite the fact that I selected Device for boot loader installation as /dev/sdb it found ESP on the other drived and used that partition for booting.(2) EFI System Partition (ESP) is named in Mint (Ubuntu) installer as EFI boot partition [3].(3) I had to be super careful with choosing mount points and partitioning her.Links:[1] http://i.stack.imgur.com/Pj1wt.png[2] https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2309806&p=13422658#post13422658[3] https://askubuntu.com/a/501360[4] https://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm
Partitioning for dual boot of two Linux systems
linux mint;partition;dual boot;uefi
If you are using MBR, GRUB can call os-prober to scan all partitions for bootable systems.  os-prober (and its cousin, linux-boot-prober, which is called by os-prober) will search all known disks and their partitions for bootable systems.  For linux systems it will search for partitions that contain ./vmlinuz* and ./initrd*/./initramfs* or partitions containing a directory called /boot and the former files.grub-mkconfig will attempt to use os-prober if it can find it and will print a grub.cfg including all systems it found.Personally, I find this to be less work than using UEFI but keep reading.For UEFI, first of all you definitely can have several EFI partitions.  Yet, it is not a good idea to have several EFI partitions in a multiboot system.  This SU answer goes into a lot of detail why, mostly because you can have subdirectories inside a single EFI partition and have a different systems in each subdirectory.  You simply make a bind mount to a different place of the EFI partition to be the /boot directory on each system.For example you can create two different loaders, say:\loader\entries\mint.conftitle    Mint Linuxlinux    \mint\vmlinuzinitrd   \mint\initrd.imgoptions  root=PARTUUID=14420948-2cea-4de7-b042-40f67c618660 rw\loader\entries\centos.conftitle    CentOSlinux    \centos\vmlinuz-linuxinitrd   \centos\initramfs-linux.imgoptions  root=PARTUUID=14420948-2cea-4de7-b042-40f67c618661 rwYou need the UUID for the bootloader to know which root filesystem to use.  Now you can place the kernel and initial ramfs of each install into their own directory on the EFI partition (one in mint and another on centos).On each system you then make an /etc/fstab with a bind mount to use the right part of the EFI partition as the /boot directory.  For example:<EFI part> /efi vfat defaults 0 0/efi/EFI/mint /boot none defaults,bind 0 0and<EFI part> /efi vfat defaults 0 0/efi/EFI/centos /boot none defaults,bind 0 0Each system will now be able to place its kernel in the right place on upgrade, and the boot happens through UEFI.Links:How many EFI partitions a computer can have?