Dual Booting: How in god's name?!

I have one drive, 1tb with Pop_OS, and another, 500 on to which i want to install windows. (I know, I dont like it either but I want to play VR games via link cable cause ALVR is really mid) So, I put the ISO on a drive with ventoy, booted it up, got it all going. started to install windows on the empty drive. So, after the five steps it kicks me out of the installer and now, I can’t acess the second drive. Even through moving the boot order on BIOS, it always loads me into pop os. The only time it ever didn’t do this is one time where it seemingly randomly gave me boot options, two of which were Pop_OS and one was “windows boot manager”, which when selected turned off my computer and promptly i booted right back into Pop_OS. Can anyone provide some advice? TIA.

mr_right, (edited )
@mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

There is a niffty Boot manager called Refined. This is what I use even though I installed Windows after Linux and had many kernel panics, but it does the job well since it scans your boot drive every time you Power on your machine. Here is a link. Just download the CD-ROM version, put it in ventoy, boot from it, and the rest is easy. You already are a linux user, you can figure it out.

I also advise you to disable Windows updates if you can, and I mean all updates, because they can mess the boot order. If you use Windows to play games and games only.

Edit: You can also install it from your distro package manager if you can access your system.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

that is exclusively how i use it, thanks for the tip

mr_right,
@mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

No problem, just returning the good of the community. Tell me if it worked out.

terminhell,

General rule of dual booting from the same drive: install windows first, then Linux.

Stillhart,

I’m no expert, but if you’re installing both from scratch, my understanding is it’s easier to install Windows first.

raven,

From Pop_OS, if you launch the “disks” program, can you see the other drive there, and the NTFS windows partition on it?

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

yes, there’s an NTFS partition. Heres a screenshot:

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/295faa75-5a89-42cb-ab15-254fd1572237.png

raven,

Well it’s there at least. Hmm. I don’t know a whole lot about windows but you can certainly get back to those boot options you saw before by pressing shift while booting, which will open the GRUB options. I’d give the windows boot manager another shot from there.

If that ends up working you can change the grub settings to wait for input instead of automatically booting pop. If that doesn’t work then something is probably wrong with windows and I would just try reinstalling since it sounds like you don’t have anything on there yet.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

thank you i will try.

raven,

rat-salute-2

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

at this point i am considering uninstalling Pop and getting win10 first because linux actually has sensible ways to dual boot even on the same drive. that’s probably what i’ll have to do.

wesker,
@wesker@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I swore off dual booting a couple years ago, but I do recall the order in which I installes the OS’ did matter. So it’s worth a shot.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

i have done that successfully at the cost of my sleep schedule lmao.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

do i need to install the grub bootloader? because no matter what i do holding shift doesn’t do anything. i am on windows reinstall number 3 now

raven,

Apparently I’m wrong and Pop_Os uses systemD-boot not GRUB, which is surprising to me because unless things have changed I’ve always thought of systemD-boot as being underpowered for a lot of use cases.

If I’m reading the wiki correctly here, I think it’s saying systemd-boot cannot launch windows because it’s on another drive? wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Boot_from_a…

But on the other hand it’s interesting that it’s able to “see” the windows partition so I might be completely wrong.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

this is indeed, pretty damn weird. I’m going to go with uninstalling pop os, and getting windows first on the smaller drive, then getting either KDE Neon or Linux Mint on the bigger one. kinda sucks, i wish i couldve just installed but it doesn’t seem like there is anything i can do. thank you so much for the help, comrade. rat-salute

F04118F,

FYI: Pop!_OS 22.04 uses systemd-boot, not GRUB.

I use rEFInd, which auto-detects my Windows boot partition. Though I had the Windows installation before the Linux one.

Systemd-boot should be able to detect a bootable Windows too. I don’t remember the specifics. It works out of the box on my laptop. Google “systemd Windows boot”.

Alternatively, maybe something went wrong with the Windows install and you nees to do the Windows repair USB stick thingy. Do you have a Windows recovery partition?

Atemu,
@Atemu@lemmy.ml avatar

Ah I think Windows does this “helpful” thing where it installs its bootloader into the ESP of any drive if it’s already present rather than the drive you explicitly told it to install onto.

You didn’t have anything in it yet, right? Unplug all other drives and then re-install Windows onto the drive. It should work as expected after that.

IIRC Pop!_OS sets the systemd-boot timeout super short; you have to hold a key after the firmware is done or something to get to it reliably or simply increase the timeout (1s is enough, I have it set to that on my systems). systemd-boot should give you the option to boot any windows installation though, it can auto-detect them.

blakeus12,
@blakeus12@hexbear.net avatar

thank you for the suggestion! i ended up uninstalling pop and windows then doing windows first but i appreciate the suggestion

possiblylinux127,

Try updating grub. If windows pops up as well as pop os you are golden.

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