Apparently my long text did not go through. So I’ll start over here.
I built a PC over the weekend, installed Windows on my HDD and pop os on my M.2 SSD. I kept having some issue that a itracked down to: when I restarted from Windows, bios and everything else could not see the SSD as installed. But if I shutdown and booted up, it shows up.
I figured that was enough to reinstall pop os, and just shutdown instead of restart to switch OS. Now once I did that and booted up windows, some diagnostics ran that I think overwrote the Linux boot files with windows boot, so now I can’t launch pop os, only windows.
I’m beyond frustrated and just want to be able to work on school stuff instead of installing OSs over and over. I wanted to avoid installing with the other drive removed because getting the SSD in and out is a pain, but will that fix things? Should I instead have /root of pop os and the C drive of windows on the SSD and then /home and a D drive on the HDD? What’s the best way to stop wasting my time with this and move on with dual boots?
Windows will absolutely wreck your Linux boot everytime it boots from my experience (I’m exaggerating the technical side a bit of course). The way I got my dual boot under control was to install easyUEFI on windows and from there to set Grub as Launcher: https://www.easyuefi.com/index-us.html Look here for a guide: https://superuser.com/questions/1247300/how-to-make-uefi-bios-start-grub-not-windows#1248255
Also later make sure windows has Fastboot and energy saving disabled or it will lock down your write access for any disk that is installed in your PC.