I have a question. When you install Linux on a secondary hdd/sdd after Windows, with Windows installed on the primary hdd/sdd, ON A UEFI SYSTEM , will the linux installer add a boot entry to the windows bcdstore on the primary drive, so you can then select whether to boot windows or linux? I installed linux mint once like this and it created a uefi boot menu entry not on the windows boot loader but on the uefi boot menu. Does this make sense?
I really don't see what all the fuss is about. You ALWAYS install your Linux after Windows, makes no difference whether its the 1st or 2nd drive. The Linux distro will find and display Windows in the boot up menu. It really is that simple.
UEFI BIOS doesn't look for disks to boot from. It looks for boot loaders on the EFI 100M Fat32 partition.
You can have only one disk with the EFI 100M Fat32 partition (that will take the boot sequence to a partition on same disk or to a partition on another disk.
My suggestion is to detach ALL other disks (power or SATA cable) from the MB leaving on only the disk you want to have windows or Linux installed. It will create a EFI 100M Fat32 partition on the disk with the boot loader for the installation.This way you make sure that Boot loader + OS are in same disk
So far, I have used EasyBCD to select which of four Windows 10 partitions to boot up. I think @shockwaveriderz is asking if you can extend that approach to include a Linux partition. I hope I'm not misunderstanding what @shockwaveriderz wrote above.
When i installed my linux mint on disk 2, AFTER windows had already been installed on disk 1, i had to press f10 at bootup, to get the uefi boot selection menu to select linux to boot. It did not put as far as i know any files in the windows created efi system partition on disk 1.
I could be wrong on that last point as I never checked the efi system partition to see if their was any linux specific files written there, like the linux efi loader
It did not put a linux boot menu entry into the windows bcdstore which is what i would have preferred.
Hope this makes sense
shockwaveriderz, please post a hole window of disk management.
Open disk management, expand the columns so we can read them and with the snipping tool take a snapshot of hole window and save to your disk.
On the Quick Reply window - Go Advanced - Paper Clip - Add files - Browse to the image file - upload
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