[ajoy39]

my first semester of college back in 2010 I, for reasons I cannot explained, decided that I would keep my windows and linux installs on totally separate hard drives. With a laptop. With one drive bay. You never appreciate how quick rebooting into linux is until you spend 4 months physically swapping a hard drive every time you want to switch which OS you're using.

I was not a smart freshman

[aruggirello]

If your laptop was able to boot from USB, perhaps you could place the second disk (the one with Linux) in an external USB 2.0 (better yet 3.0) case. That'd solve the issue...