So, I have my desktop configured with two drives, one has a regular windows install on it that I need to play games with my brother. That works fine.
My second drive originally had Debian on it. But I wanted to also install EndeavorOS. At this point in time, all 3 work, but the selection process to access each system is painfully different.

To access Windows, I just boot from cold, and hit enter or wait for the timer to run out on Windows booting. But when I hit esc to cancel booting Windows, it brings me to Debian’s GRUB selector. But I think when I installed EOS I used the default settings, and I believe it doesn’t use GRUB by default (systemd). So the GRUB menu I get only has Debian or Windows. If I hit ‘esc’ again I am brought to the grub> command line. Here the only thing I know how to do is type “exit” and it closes this grub> cmd line and opens another, very similar one. I type ‘exit’ again and I am finally met with EndeavorOS’s boot selector (I believe this is systemd?)

Now I know from my first dual boot with windows/Debian that I am pretty much stuck having windows boot loader run first, so my perfect scenario of having a single selector off boot is a pipe dream, but I’d love to remove a few of the GRUB cmd steps in getting to EOS (chances are I will only need the Debian system for very specific tasks. odds are I will end up removing it) I’m guessing if I would have told the EOS installer to use GRUB it would have potentially added EOS to the GRUB selection screen? Is it possible to rectify this without wiping and reinstalling with different boot loader options?

  • Mactan@lemmy.ml
    6·
    4 months ago

    windows can and will break any multiboot it gets it’s hands on, guaranteed just a matter of time

    • Nimrod@lemm.eeOP
      1·
      4 months ago

      Interesting… but that just replaces an existing step with another step. I’d like to reduce the overall steps to get to each system. And if I can’t do that, I’d at least like to switch the order to win>EOS>Deb

      • jeffreyosborne@lemm.ee
        3·
        4 months ago

        I’d have a look at the archwiki and install GRUB on eos, and in your bios set eos to be the first boot option, and that will give you the grub boot menu with the option to boot eos, debian or windows.

  • Ooops@feddit.org
    3·
    4 months ago

    Dual booting with Windows is always a pain, because Windows likes to nuke and replace your boot menu. The safest bet is keep Windows strictly separated: You create a 2nd efi system partition on your second drive with linux, use a boot loader there and then set everything up to start that as default. And then you configure the boot loader to chainload windows from it’s own ESP on disk one. This way Windows is oblivious about linux systems it might try to damage. And you can then set the boot loader menu to a default or to default to the last system booted. (2 separate ESPs on on disk might work, but that is not supported by UEFI, so it depends on your hardware’s implementation if they are recognized or if it just stops after having found the first…).

    I would assume what you did was install the Linux boot loader (efi file) as the default like removable drives do (so grub’s efi file installed as esp/EFI/BOOT/BOOT64.efi which is the default for removably drives to take priority; done via grub-install with the --removable flag, some installations might use this by default…)

  • funkajunk@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    4 months ago

    People normally warn against dual booting because of the headaches it can cause - you went and fucked up with triple boot.

  • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Try rEFInd. It’s pretty good about detecting OSes and auto-populating its menu, and it has a pretty easy conf file format otherwise. Installing the refind debian package mayybe will also register it with the system firmware, I don’t recall. If not, it can be set up with efibootmgr (which is not the most pleasant program, sadly).

  • sgtlion [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Are they installed on separate drives? Depending on the exact setup, Linux and windows both generally support legacy as a boot method, so you may be able to just BIOS to select a boot drive.