I'm having a bit of trouble with my system setup. I need to boot into Windows for work occasionally, and I do this using a 2.5" SSD enclosure that fits in my optical drive bay. When I boot with just the Windows SSD, everything works perfectly. However, once I switch back to the Linux SSD, UEFI stops recognizing it as bootable. The only way I can fix this issue is by booting into a live Linux environment to mount the drives, chroot into the system, and reinstall GRUB. I'm aware that I could use `efibootmgr` as well, but I prefer working with GRUB because I'm more comfortable with it. Is there any way to prevent this issue from recurring? It's quite frustrating to go through these recovery steps every time.
1 Answer
Could you share which version of Windows you’re using? Also, I'm curious: is the Windows SSD always installed? What motherboard are you on? It’s good to check if there's an EFI boot partition on each drive and whether you're powering down completely when switching between the SSDs. Fast Boot and Secure Boot settings can also affect UEFI recognition, so make sure those options are turned off in your BIOS settings.
Sure! I'm using Windows 11. I only connect one SSD at a time, so they shouldn't interact. My motherboard is an ASRock B650 PG Lightning, and I do have an EFI partition on each drive. Fast Boot and Secure Boot are both turned off, and I completely power down when I switch the drives.