[SOLVED] What is dual-booting? Pros and Cons

[xxscienceboyxx]

Hello,
What exactly is Dual Booting? How does it work? If 2 OS each have separate partitions for them, it possible to have them both access a third partition?
Also what are the Pros and Cons of Dual Booting? Is it more likely to be buggy than having 1 OS?

Is it worth any bugs or confusion that could happen?

 

[USAFRet]

More buggy? Potentially.
"worth it" relies on "why".

 

[TerryLaze]

What exactly is Dual Booting? How does it work?

For windows 10 there is one partition has has the BCD store which holds all the info on what to boot from where, on a normal system the only thing in the BCD store is the one and only OS so it only starts that if there are more than one entries it displays a menu for you to choose from .

If 2 OS each have separate partitions for them, it possible to have them both access a third partition?

Not only possible, this is the default, it even shows you the partition/drive of the other OS. You can use windows disk manager to hide or show any partitions you want.

Also what are the Pros and Cons of Dual Booting? Is it more likely to be buggy than having 1 OS?

Pro=you get to run more than one OS natively.
Con=your bootup is a few seconds slower because the menu will show up on each boot, default is 30 seconds but you can decrease that as much as you want, I use 3 seconds and press any of the up or down keys which makes the countdown stop.

It's not buggy at all but it is a complicated system for someone that has no idea so the chances for messing up are very high.

 

[alceryes]

There can be difficulties in setting it up, depending on the hardware (I'm looking at you Optane) and OSs in question.
Other than that, just the extra storage space needed for a second operating system is the only additional downside I can think of.

Edit - also, remember that it's just the bootloader (Windows and GRUB are common ones) that will always reside on your initial boot disk. The second OS doesn't even need to be on the same physical drive.