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

[B.S.]

Good to know, thanks Jeff.

Did you have to do anything else in the BIOS? e.g. Setting the M.2 to be 
the primary boot, so / and the grub install there chaining to the 
Windows drive when that option selected in the boot (grub) menu?

Setting up that way has given me issues in the past that I don't think I 
ever quite sorted out - I believe Windows got unhappy as it was then the 
second drive in the machine, wanted / thought it was the first ... and 
unhappiness ensued.

I believe I ended up giving up on the grub chained boot idea and instead 
pressing the select boot device bios option, when I needed Windows.

Did you run into / surmount that?

(And, any hurdles you had to work through in enabling encryption, etc.?)


On 02/07/2017 01:17 PM, CrankyOldBugger wrote:
> 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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