Not sure if this is a “me-issue” or if this is Microsoft being a dick.
Am I not supposed to dualboot with an external drive?
Microsoft is being a dick. Booting from an external USB-attached SSD works fine once you work around the installer limitations.
When I did this I ended up basically partitioning the disk manually with diskpart and installing Windows manually using the command prompt. I used this blog post to guide me:
But I remember I had some issue that made me start over… what the heck was it. Something like the modern Windows 10 image being larger than what the author had encountered. Ah - I think the issue was the WIM file was over 4GB and wouldn’t fit on the authors 4096 MB “Recovery Image” partition. So make that one larger (check the iso for the wim file’s size) if you plan to create a recovery partition.
Another bookmark I made at the time was this, I think it was mainly for the command listing the SKUs supported by the WIM file, but no guarantees, it’s been a while: https://gist.github.com/Alee14/e8ce6306a038902df6e7a6d667544ac9
Good luck if you decide to try!
Fun fact: Windows will overwrite GRUB if you install Windows after Linux or otherwise perform an action that allows it to mess with the boot loader.
Fun fact part 2: windows will (or used to) overwrite grub when installing updates, but not all updates that would make it predictable and less fun
That never happened to me in the last 10 years of dual-booting.
It did to me. I actually stopped using Arch because I thought an Arch update nuked my bootloader during an update. It wasn’t until a couple years later when I’d learned more that I realized it was more than likely windows “upgrading” to 11.
I’ve found the only long-term, totally happy dual boot system is where you autoboot into Linux. And never boot into Windows. Every now and then I have to go back into my Win10 to do something (much rarer now, almost ready to reclaim some space). Boy, Windows hates having any signs you’ve been somewhere else.
That’s for MBR partitioned disks, where they fight over the first sector of the disk which is used as the boot sector.
Computer models starting from around 2013 should support UEFI boot. If you boot in UEFI mode you use a GPT partitioned disk with an EFI System Partition. In there Windows does not overwrite grub. In mine for example grub was in the ESP under /EFI/fedora/ and Microsoft found the ESP and put its stuff in /EFI/Microsoft.
The worst I’ve experienced is that Windows puts the Windows Boot Manager back on top of the UEFI boot order, to fix that, I wrote a comment before, that I’ll just link here, if it’s really just the order you can also just change it back in the UEFI menu.
Another bad thing is that some laptop UEFIs, especially early ones are utterly broken. They ignore your boot order, or your entries in the UEFI boot manager, sometimes they just load the fallback path defined in the UEFI spec, which is \EFI\Boot\BOOTX64.efi, but that’s the OEMs fault. I’ve seen both Fedora and Microsoft write their loader to the fallback path. I’m not sure if they clobber the other ones if it exists already, because I never boot from that path, so I wouldn’t notice.
Great insight, thank you!
The problem is the usb. If you want to run windows from a removable drive you need a special installation, called “Windows To Go”.
You can install it with rufus: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/install-windows-to-go/
Rufus is the answer
It is saving you. Don’t install an OS to removable media. (Especially Windows since it is I/O heavy)
Windows acts like it is the only OS installed on the machine. Your best bet is to physically disconnect all other drives while installing windows.
That’s not the problem though. Even if you have no other OS installed, windows still refuses to install on external HDDs.
Absolutely. The last thing you want is Windows’ multi-OS boot manager popping up all the time. BIOS handles that more than well enough.
100% this.
Physically remove the windows drive, then install on your other drive, once it’s all working plug the windows drive back in
Physically removing it is overkill. Just disconnect the SATA cable.
Yes if you have a cable to disconnect you can do that as well
Most modern machines are m.2 with no cable
Searches for a SATA cable, cries in multiple m.2
I was concerned about win 10 killing my linux boot loader on my old system, so I installed linux on another drive and would pick from boot menu which drive to load (for some reason my efi wouldn’t let me boot from the sata ssd automatically but windows had a drive in both m.2 slots, I have a new system and don’t worry bout windows messing me up as there is no windows on this machine
Windows on an external drive isn’t officially supported if I remember right. Your screenshot seems to support that.
Honestly, I’d be leery of installing an OS on an external drive as they tend not to age well with heavy use.
Are you trying to necro a laptop with a dead drive? If so, depending on the model, it might just be worth replacing the internal drive so then you can go ahead with your dual boot plan.
Also, quick tip, install windows, then disable fast startup in windows, then disable safeboot in your bios. Otherwise, when it comes time to install mint, you might hit issues with windows saying “NO, MY DRIVE”.
If you install mint and get no grub screen, just boot mint with your live usb and look up repairing grub - should be nice and easy.
Afaik most guides suggest setting up linux after windows because of some bootloader stuff. So if you already have linux installed I would suggest setting up a virtual machine if you don’t need running windows on raw hardware.
You can set them up in either order, you just need to set them up separately by disconnecting the Linux drive (or the drive of any other OS, even a 2nd Windows install) when installing Windows. Windows needs to think it’s the only OS installed.
But yeah it’s probably simpler to do Windows then Linux, as Linux doesn’t care, so you won’t need to unplug anything.
Agreed on this. Last time I dual booted Windows (some 10 years ago), the procedure was to first install Windows and then install Linux.
If you want to dual boot, the best way to do it is on an internal drive.
For the smoothest of operations would I highly recommend is a hard drive with just Windows installed internally and a boot drive with Linux on it, like on a portable hard drive or something along those lines. Mint in this case works really well of course.
Windows doesn’t install to USB.
You could probably get round this by creating a VM and passing this disk through as the only storage. Do the Windows install in the VM and then delete the VM and boot directly to the disk.
I believe there are ways of skipping this error and installing on an external USB drive. The question is - would you really want to use Windows over USB. It would be unbearably slow.
additionally, it would lower the lifespan of your usb. just get an external ssd.
Lifespan of the USB?
Do you mean the USB drive or the actual bus?The drive. Using Windows on a USB means constantly reading and writing to the USB, which wears it down.
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It is likely UEFI secure boot.
Linux Mint is signed by Microsoft…
