[SOLVED] Occassional dual boot windows and Mint on seperate SSDs.

[bwallx]

As an experiment I created a Linux Mint system on a spare SSD and booted my PC with both my win 10 and Linux drives on SATA. I use the mobo F11 key to select what to boot from.

There were problems. If I selected the Linux SSD itself I got a grub text screen. Then on the boot selection screen I saw that as well as the Linux drive there was a 'drive' called Ubuntu. That booted OK.

However, when I removed that drive to only use Win 10 on the PC, I got a windows RECOVERY error message

"The application or operating system couldn't be loaded because the required file is missing or contains errors. File windows\system32\winload.exe error 0.000000e"

By selecting the Windows manager option in the UEFI F11 start up screen it loaded windows but asked which OS to load first even though the Linux drive wasn't connected.

I am not that technical so I hope I have explained it right. It seems that by connecting a second OS, my UEFI has kept a record, and the file winload.exe I found had been modified today.

So, what I would appreciate is advice on how to occassionally boot into Linux Mint on its entirely seperate SSD without Windows SSD connected (for security reasons). So I don't want a permanent dual boot system. The Linux SSD won't normally be connected. Can I swap the Windows SSD for the Linux one and boot without my system recording that for future boots if you see what I mean.

The Linux drive is for crypto currency trading by the way and security is vital.

Many thanks for any suggestions and if you want clarification, just ask.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Lutfij]

Just out of curiosity, did you follow through this guide when you performed a dual boot for your platform? As an added measure you might want to see if your motherboard is on the latest BIOS update. You will also need to make sure you've got Windows 10 version 20H2 on your SSD as older versions can and will croak from time to time.

 

[kerberos_20]

easiest way would be like this:
connect one drive with windows on it, if it cant boot, just repair its boot through usb windows install media
once done, disconnect it
connect your linux drive, get some flash drive and make it bootable (rufus is handy tool for this), put grub there as boot loader link it with your installed linux drive (u can add boot entry for windows aswell if needed)
then u just delete grub from your linux drive so it wont boot
u can connect windows drive back
windows will boot as default OS, linux will boot only with inserted flash drive

 

[bwallx]

Just out of curiosity, did you follow through this guide when you performed a dual boot for your platform? As an added measure you might want to see if your motherboard is on the latest BIOS update. You will also need to make sure you've got Windows 10 version 20H2 on your SSD as older versions can and will croak from time to time.

Thank you. The link seems to be for a dual boot system and as I explained I only want a single boot system, either Win10 or Mint, depending on which drive I happen to have plugged-in. When booting from the Windows drive I want it to boot direct into Win10. When booting from the Mint drive I want it to boot straight into Linux. It seems to do this I have to circumvent modifications made to the drives, maybe.

 

[CountMike]

easiest way would be like this:
connect one drive with windows on it, if it cant boot, just repair its boot through usb windows install media
once done, disconnect it
connect your linux drive, get some flash drive and make it bootable (rufus is handy tool for this), put grub there as boot loader link it with your installed linux drive (u can add boot entry for windows aswell if needed)
then u just delete grub from your linux drive so it wont boot
u can connect windows drive back
windows will boot as default OS, linux will boot only with inserted flash drive

Exactly how I do it, you don't want Linux even mentioned in your windows BOOT sector. I also make sure that CSM is either enabled or disabled for installation of Widows or Linux depending if you are going for UEFI or Legacy on both of them

 

[bwallx]

easiest way would be like this:
connect one drive with windows on it, if it cant boot, just repair its boot through usb windows install media
once done, disconnect it
connect your linux drive, get some flash drive and make it bootable (rufus is handy tool for this), put grub there as boot loader link it with your installed linux drive (u can add boot entry for windows aswell if needed)
then u just delete grub from your linux drive so it wont boot
u can connect windows drive back
windows will boot as default OS, linux will boot only with inserted flash drive

Thank you will play around.

 

[CountMike]

Thank you. The link seems to be for a dual boot system and as I explained I only want a single boot system, either Win10 or Mint, depending on which drive I happen to have plugged-in. When booting from the Windows drive I want it to boot direct into Win10. When booting from the Mint drive I want it to boot straight into Linux. It seems to do this I have to circumvent modifications made to the drives, maybe.

It is a Dual BOOT even if it's on separate disks.