Hey everyone! I need a bit of help. I've got a setup with Windows 10 and Ubuntu installed on an external disk, which I use all the time. It's been working well; when the disk is plugged in, the grub boot manager lets me select Ubuntu, and if not, I just boot into Windows with a quick command. Now I'm on vacation with only my laptop running Windows 11 and my external disk with Ubuntu. Is there an easy way to boot my existing Ubuntu installation on this laptop without messing around too much with settings or the boot manager?
1 Answer
It sounds like when you installed Ubuntu, you might have shared the EFI partition on your internal drive of the PC. Ideally, you should have used a separate EFI partition on your external drive during the install. There are ways to configure grub on your laptop so it can boot from the USB, but be careful—if you mess up, you might end up with an unbootable laptop and will need a Windows recovery USB to fix it. I recommend trying the Ubuntu boot-repair tool from a live USB. Just boot from the live USB and run that tool, and it might set everything right for you. Just a heads up, if your internal EFI partition is too small, you could run into issues later on.
I checked my BIOS settings, and it looks like there's no legacy support option. Do you think dual booting would still work for me?