Dual booting using bootable flash drive that can contain two different operating systems

[Nick1501]

I have an HP Pavilion Gaming laptop, which works very well. I just wanted to dual boot to use ubuntu operating software. When I bought the laptop, the sellers had given me a free flash drive but they installed the windows 11 OS and put a duplicate of the Windows 11 OS onto the flash drive ( I don't know if I am wording it correctly), making it a  bootable flash drive. They also told me not to use the flash drive for any other purpose. I am wondering if I can use the same flash drive to install and boot ubuntu software for dual booting. Should I treat this flash drive as any normal flash drive to install ubuntu for initiating the dual boot, especially the Rufus or Universal USB installer processes available on the internet? Or is there any other way to do this using the same flash drive? The flash drive is 32 GB in size, 16 GB is left after Windows 11 duplicate OS was put in it. I'm hoping I can use this space and not buy another flash drive.

[BeemerBiker · Accepted solution]

Flash drives are cheap, get another one and keep your "only" copy of win 11 safe.  It has all the free stuff that comes with your system.

You might consider installing Mictosofts linux which runs under windows:  "Windows subsystem for linux".  It is in the windows store.

If you decide to actually boot linux be aware you need to disable secure boot and possibly TPM. and then re-enable those features to get back to win11.

[Nick1501]

Thank you, I bought a new flash drive to boot ubuntu. I have tried windows subsystems for Linux but it might not be suitable for my work.

I'm just concerned about the available space. I will not mess with the windows 11 flash drive but maybe I can find a way to use my new flash drive (also 32 GB, which seems like a large flash drive since the ubuntu files only occupied 3.4 GB but bought it just in case the files needed more space) to store other files. There seems to be a problem with format stuff when you store an operating system on a USB, which does not allow other files to be stored.

I will work my way out of this, thanks again for the solution.

[BeemerBiker]

I ran int the same problem.  I needed to make a changes to the BOINC source code but there was so much stuff missing in that windows version it was far easier to use a remote desktop (VNC or Splashtop) to a cheap headless Linux system.    Plus I could test some of the apps that run under my mod on native Linux which I could not do under windows Linux.

You should be able partition that 32gb into a pair of 16 to allow the other half to be used by Windows.  Alternately, shrink the C drive and create another partition for transferring files to / from linux.