Grub2Win 1.0.1.3

A simple program that allows you to safely dual boot Windows and Linux on your system is Grub2Win. You can use it to boot ISO files directly or select from various OS choices.

Using Grub2Win

The green-themed setup screen let us select the target drive and choose whether or not to create a desktop shortcut. A progress box allowed us to view the setup process. We could delete the install directory after the setup completed successfully.

The main configuration screen let us set up the way we wanted the software to work. Some of the things that we could do included:

• Managing EFI partition modules
• Setting EFI firmware boot order
• Setting the grub timeout seconds and Windows boot timeout seconds
• Selecting the default OS, theme, graphics mode and locale language

The "Manage Boot Menu" button on the lower part of the window enabled us to add our OS selections. Only Windows OS appeared by default, and we needed to add Linux systems manually. We then clicked the "OK" button to complete the installation.

When we clicked the "Manage Boot Menu" button, a window appeared that contained different operating systems, with down and up arrows to the right of each OS. We changed the menu sequence using the arrows, and a check box on the upper part of the window let us choose whether to set the last booted OS as the default one.

We could add a new item or edit the details of an existing OS. The details that we could change included the menu entry number, OS type, title, icon, OS graphics, pause seconds and hotkey. Other things that we could do included setting partition labels, adding notes to Grub configuration and Booting ISO files.

We then clicked the "Apply" button when we had made our desired selections.

We could run the GUI as often as we wanted to either change boot options or add systems. The program maintained five backup copies of the most recent update logs and settings.

Conclusion

Grub2Win is a handy program that conveniently allows users to dual boot Windows and Linux operating systems on their computers. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP, and it supports very large disks with a capacity of over 4 TB.