Dual Boot - Dual Drives?

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Hi!
I’ve now had EOS / Windows 11 dual boot on my PC for about two months. Now after another (unannounced) Windows update, Windows has again destroyed GRUB (the third time in two months) and I’m seriously loosing my sh*t over here. Is there a way to stop this madness?

I use EOS as my default but I have to switch to Windows if I want to play Valorant, etc. with my friends so I cannot just use EOS for gaming and productivity.

I thought that maybe using two separate drives could help but I’m not sure if that helps or how to set it up but I want to finally put an end to this suffering.

2

If you use two separate drives, you can install the bootloader onto the linux drive, and then configure the bios to use the bootloader on your linux drive, which shouldn’t get overwritten by windows anymore.

3

So I then select if I want to use EOS or Windows from the boot menu instead of GRUB?

4

You could also create a separate ESP for your EnOS and install its bootloader in there.

Like this, there is no need to reinstall and Windows will let your EnOS’ ESP alone.

Post some info so we can have a look at your setup:

sudo parted -l

efibootmgr
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5

No but Grub will detect Windows on the other drive, if the osprober package is installed/activated. You can boot linux and windows from within grub.

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6

for reasons like this plus a whole lot more little ‘sabotages’ I will never run windows with a linux distro on the same drive.
your life will improve with dual-boot, dual drive. I would even go so far to unplug WIN from the mobo if you have a desktop.
play your cards right in the bios, as svartis and pebcak say, make the right parted moves (set both drives with boot flag etc). and you will have the choice menu when you boot. show pebcak your output and get on with it godspeed :v:

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7

I think I’ll go with the dual drive option, I still have an SSD from my old PC that I can use.

Since I can currently only boot into Windows, is there a way to move my EOS installation from the shared drive onto the new drive without loosing it?

8

I might not be quite the right person for advising on “disk cloning” .

However, since you had a shared ESP with windows, you would need to create a FAT32 partition on the other disk and flag it as boot,esp. Then you could use something like Gparted to copy-paste your system partition. At the end you would need to chroot into this partition and install Grub’s bootloader onto the new ESP and also edit the entry for the new ESP in /etc/fstab to have the new UUID.

You should keep in mind that any partition manipulation runs the risk of data corruption or loss so if you want to go for cloning, you better backup your valuable personal data to another storage medium.

If you need further assistance, post the output of the commands I asked before.

At the end, a clean install maybe the better option. You could always install your software and move your data and config files and folders to the new installation.

9

I have dual disk in my test pc, one with Windows including windows bootloader, the other with eos, including their bootloader.
So yes 2 completely separated drives, i select the disk in bios/uefi bootmenu and made EOS the default boot entry

During install i had only one disk connected, this way the installer can’t overwrite a bootloader on the other disk. It is a little bit more work but this way those 2 disks are completely separated

Sure there are other/better methods to do this, but it works for me

10

You don’t need to move it. It doesn’t matter which disk it is installed onto.

You only need a second EFI partition so Windows and grub aren’t sharing the same one. It can be on the same disk or a different one. Likewise it doesn’t need to be on the same disk as the install itself.

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11

I made the suggestion but they wanted to go dual disk :man_shrugging:t4: