[kwlug-disc] Adventures in dual boot land...

[CrankyOldBugger]

A couple of months ago I picked up an M.2 drive for my main desktop, with
the intention of loading Ubuntu on it for a dual boot setup with Windows 10
on the other drives.  It's part of my big plan to completely eliminate
Windows from my systems.

Last time I did a dual boot was when Microsoft first started pushing
EFI/UEFI/Secure Boot and that sort of stuff.  The solution at the time was
to turn these features off in the BIOS if you wanted to install Linux.  So
I did the same thing this time around when I tried to install Ubuntu on the
M.2.

So the setup is:

/dev/sda is the Windows 10 SSD
/dev/sdb is a 1TB HDD for the Windows side
/dev/sdc is the new M.2 for Ubuntu
/dev/sdd is the USB stick for installing Ubuntu from (and of course only
temporary)

I ran in to nothing but trouble with this on this install.  Ubuntu seems to
install fine, for the most part, but it always failed when it came time to
writing GRUB on the Windows 10 disk. I tried going with different sorts of
partitioning schemes, using GParted to set up the linux side prior to
installation, I even tried other distros such as Fedora to install.  Just
couldn't get past the "writing GRUB" part.

Some help sites suggested letting the install finish sans GRUB, but I
couldn't even do that as the install wouldn't get past this error without a
hard reboot.

So, with nothing else to think of, I turned on the EFI stuff in the BIOS,
and sure enough, Ubuntu was able to write GRUB to the Windows 10 drive with
no problems.  I now have a working dual boot configuration (and as a bonus,
I haven't booted into Windows since the install).

I mentioned this to a few friends of mine and one of them seems to think
that the new M.2 drives require EFI (or UEFI, whatever) to be turned on for
proper operation, but I haven't been able to confirm this yet.

So I post this to the group in case anyone else out there is having
dual-boot issues involving Windows 10 or M.2 drives.  It's one of those "I
don't know why it works, but it does" situations.
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