So, I have my desktop configured with two drives, one has a regular windows install on it that I need to play games with my brother. That works fine.
My second drive originally had Debian on it. But I wanted to also install EndeavorOS. At this point in time, all 3 work, but the selection process to access each system is painfully different.

To access Windows, I just boot from cold, and hit enter or wait for the timer to run out on Windows booting. But when I hit esc to cancel booting Windows, it brings me to Debian’s GRUB selector. But I think when I installed EOS I used the default settings, and I believe it doesn’t use GRUB by default (systemd). So the GRUB menu I get only has Debian or Windows. If I hit ‘esc’ again I am brought to the grub> command line. Here the only thing I know how to do is type “exit” and it closes this grub> cmd line and opens another, very similar one. I type ‘exit’ again and I am finally met with EndeavorOS’s boot selector (I believe this is systemd?)

Now I know from my first dual boot with windows/Debian that I am pretty much stuck having windows boot loader run first, so my perfect scenario of having a single selector off boot is a pipe dream, but I’d love to remove a few of the GRUB cmd steps in getting to EOS (chances are I will only need the Debian system for very specific tasks. odds are I will end up removing it) I’m guessing if I would have told the EOS installer to use GRUB it would have potentially added EOS to the GRUB selection screen? Is it possible to rectify this without wiping and reinstalling with different boot loader options?

  • Ooops
    3·
    4 months ago

    Dual booting with Windows is always a pain, because Windows likes to nuke and replace your boot menu. The safest bet is keep Windows strictly separated: You create a 2nd efi system partition on your second drive with linux, use a boot loader there and then set everything up to start that as default. And then you configure the boot loader to chainload windows from it’s own ESP on disk one. This way Windows is oblivious about linux systems it might try to damage. And you can then set the boot loader menu to a default or to default to the last system booted. (2 separate ESPs on on disk might work, but that is not supported by UEFI, so it depends on your hardware’s implementation if they are recognized or if it just stops after having found the first…).

    I would assume what you did was install the Linux boot loader (efi file) as the default like removable drives do (so grub’s efi file installed as esp/EFI/BOOT/BOOT64.efi which is the default for removably drives to take priority; done via grub-install with the --removable flag, some installations might use this by default…)