Hi everyone, I am wanting to gradually make the switch from windows to Linux on my daily use desktop. I figured the best way would be to dual boot them. I have a spare drive in my desktop that I cleaned for Linux so I can have it on a separate drive from windows. Here the process I went through which ended up being unsuccessful. Removed windows drive, installed mint on seperate SSD, install was successful, installed steam and tried some games, shut down PC, put windows drive back in PC, PC wouldn't boot to windows drive but was still booting to mint, went into BIOS and selected boot over ride to windows drive, still wouldn't boot, created windows recovery USB, tried to fix boot in recovery mode, recovery media wasn't able to fix boot, booted into mint, mounted windows drive and removed all the documents I needed to external drive, nuked windows and Linux drives and did a fresh install of windows.
Afterward, I googled how to do this properly. And the posts I found detailed basically the same process I did. I would like to try again but I don't know what I did wrong and don't want to have to go through that again.
Thanks.
PS. I have an extensive library in steam already. There's several games that I have hours into and have friends that I play with, which is why I want to keep windows for the time being while I figure out how Linux gaming works.
EDIT: thanks for all the comments. It appears my problem was when I removed my windows drive from my PC when installing mint. I will try again and keep both drives in my PC. Thanks!
EDIT 2: UPDATE: I have successfully dual booted windows 10 and linux mint. After thinking about my problem for a while, i remembered an important detail. When I first built my PC, I had windows installed on a 120gb Kingston ssd. I then later purchased an M.2 and installed windows on there. That Kingston ssd is what i wiped and put linux on, so i'm thinking maybe the bootloader stayed on the kingston drive?? i'm not exactly sure, but after watching this video, I was confident that my original plan would work this time since i did a clean wipe of both drives and did a fresh install of windows on the M.2. I am now able to boot into windows 10 and Mint from the bios with no issues. Thanks everyone for your help.
SOLVED TLDR: you can dual boot windows and linux on 2 separate drives, and it is perfectly safe (and recommended in the video i linked) to remove the windows drive from the PC, while installing linux on another drive.
Just spitballing here, but if I read this correctly, you pulled the Windows drive, installed Mint, and then put the Windows drive back in alongside the Mint drive? If so, that might be the issue.
UEFI firmware looks for a special EFI partition on the boot drive, and loads the operating system's own bootloader from there. The Windows drive has one. When you pulled the Windows drive to install Mint on another drive, Mint had to create an EFI partition on its disk to store its bootloader.
Then, when you put the Windows disk back in, there were two EFI partitions. Perhaps the UEFI firmware was looking for the Windows bootloader in the EFI partition on the Mint disk. It would of course not find it there. In my experience, Windows recovery is utterly useless in fixing EFI boot issues.
It's possible to rebuild the Windows EFI bootloader files manually, but since you don't mind blowing away both OS installs, I'd say just install Mint on the second drive while both of them are installed in the system, so the installer puts the Mint bootloader on the same EFI partition as the Windows one. With the advent of EFI, Windows will still sometimes blow away a Linux bootloader, but Linux installers are very good at installing alongside Windows. If it does get stuffed up, there's a utility called Boot-Repair, that you can put on a USB disk, that works a lot better than Windows recovery.
Dang, I was unsure if Linux would mess up my windows drive, that's why I took it out. But I guess I was wrong. So, if I'm installing Linux on a separate drive, during installation do I need to select (install along side windows) or is that only if it's on the same drive as windows?
Keep the Windows drive plugged in while installing Mint so grub can detect it and you'll have a Windows option in grub.
I just finished doing this a few minutes ago and I had better luck. I left my drives plugged in. Booted to mint USB. Made sure I knew which drive was the empty one using the Disks app. Ran the installer and chose the option to erase disk instead of alongside. Set my BIOS to boot from new disk, and grub let's me choose between windows and Linux.
My laptop on the other hand, was not a good time. It shipped using the raid controller, so mint couldn't see the second drive. And windows freaked out at the change of disk controller and I couldn't recover. 2 operating system installs for the price of one 🫠
I appreciate the response and time to test his yourself. I will try again without removing my windows drive. That's too bad for your laptop tho. I didn't realize that laptops would ship with raid. Is that common now?
Sorry, that I'm not certain of, since that's an installer-specific thing. I think I'd try that option first, and see if the installer lets you choose the empty drive.