A Reddit Refugee. Zero ragrets.

Engineer, permanent pirate, lover of all things mechanical and on wheels

moved here from lemmy.one because there are no active admins on that instance.

  • 55 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 22nd, 2023

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  • Yep. Boot grub (linux) first and it can do windoes when you choose.

    It does not matter that the OS’es are on different physical drives, GRUB can index them just fine. Bootloader on one drive that can boot from multiple other drives is very common and I’ve set it up multiple times, as it is nice to have physical separation between OS’es and not have to deal with having 8 partitions of hell on one poor abused drive. The only issue that may arise is if you add or remove other physical drives or move the locations of existing drives as sometimes that can change how grub indexes them and it breaks. But that’s fairly easy to avoid if you pay attention and try not to touch bootable drives.


  • What linux distro did you use?

    Most all common Linux distros by default will install GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) alongside themselves, and recognize any other OS’es previously installed on the system when they do so. GRUB is a multi-bootloader that can select any bootable drive or partition that it detects when initially installed, or be reprogrammed with additional OS’es if you’re more advanced.
    When you use your F11 menu to boot to Linux, do you see this screen show up for a couple seconds?:

    If so, you’re already good for picking OS.

    All you may need to do is switch your default boot order in the BIOS to boot from the Crucial drive with Linux Mint installed, rather than default to the Windows drive as I believe it is doing right now.
    Hit F2 (i think for MSI?) on startup to get into your BIOS settings and look for the boot options menu, should look like this:
    You just need to re-order the devices so the Linux hard drive is above the Windows drive, then your BIOS will try to boot from it first and hopefully give you GRUB.

    If that doesn’t work, e.g you don’t have GRUB, that’s more complex and will take some effort. May be worth just re-installing the distro or a different distro that will set up GRUB for you as manually adding bootloaders is above my skill set. And has a risk of leaving you with a non-bootable desktop.