Hey folks, I'm in a bit of a bind with my dual boot setup and could use your insights. I'm a Linux user and recently added a second SSD for Windows 11. Now, I've got one SSD for Linux and another for Windows, each with its own EFI partition. My BIOS is set to UEFI mode, and I've toggled CSM both on and off, but I'm still having issues. The strange part is that when both drives are connected, the BIOS only recognizes the Linux drive as bootable. The Windows drive just doesn't show up in the BIOS or boot menu. However, if I disconnect the Linux SSD, my PC boots into Windows without any problems. I can access the Windows SSD from Linux, so it's detected there. I've checked that both drives are using GPT, confirmed the Windows EFI files are present, and even switched the SATA/NVMe ports around. When both drives are connected, the BIOS boot logo takes longer to load, almost as if it's stuck trying to figure out what to boot. Any advice would be appreciated!
1 Answer
It sounds like you might need to add the Windows boot entry to your systemd-boot configuration. Since Windows was installed after Linux, it can often lead to these kinds of issues. You could check out rEFInd to help auto-detect the Windows boot files and include them as options in your bootloader. You can find more detailed steps in the ArchWiki, which has solid documentation on this process.
Thanks for the suggestion! I was initially thinking of just changing the boot priority in the UEFI menu, but it looks like adding it to systemd-boot might be the way to go.