I have one drive, 1tb with Pop_OS, and another, 500 on to which i want to install windows. (I know, I dont like it either but I want to play VR games via link cable cause ALVR is really mid) So, I put the ISO on a drive with ventoy, booted it up, got it all going. started to install windows on the empty drive. So, after the five steps it kicks me out of the installer and now, I can't acess the second drive. Even through moving the boot order on BIOS, it always loads me into pop os. The only time it ever didn't do this is one time where it seemingly randomly gave me boot options, two of which were Pop_OS and one was "windows boot manager", which when selected turned off my computer and promptly i booted right back into Pop_OS. Can anyone provide some advice? TIA.
From Pop_OS, if you launch the "disks" program, can you see the other drive there, and the NTFS windows partition on it?
yes, there's an NTFS partition. Heres a screenshot:
Ah I think Windows does this "helpful" thing where it installs its bootloader into the ESP of any drive if it's already present rather than the drive you explicitly told it to install onto.
You didn't have anything in it yet, right? Unplug all other drives and then re-install Windows onto the drive. It should work as expected after that.
IIRC Pop!_OS sets the systemd-boot timeout super short; you have to hold a key after the firmware is done or something to get to it reliably or simply increase the timeout (1s is enough, I have it set to that on my systems). systemd-boot should give you the option to boot any windows installation though, it can auto-detect them.
thank you for the suggestion! i ended up uninstalling pop and windows then doing windows first but i appreciate the suggestion
Well it's there at least. Hmm. I don't know a whole lot about windows but you can certainly get back to those boot options you saw before by pressing shift while booting, which will open the GRUB options. I'd give the windows boot manager another shot from there.
If that ends up working you can change the grub settings to wait for input instead of automatically booting pop. If that doesn't work then something is probably wrong with windows and I would just try reinstalling since it sounds like you don't have anything on there yet.
thank you i will try.
at this point i am considering uninstalling Pop and getting win10 first because linux actually has sensible ways to dual boot even on the same drive. that's probably what i'll have to do.
I swore off dual booting a couple years ago, but I do recall the order in which I installed the OS' did matter. So it's worth a shot.
i have done that successfully at the cost of my sleep schedule lmao.
do i need to install the grub bootloader? because no matter what i do holding shift doesn't do anything. i am on windows reinstall number 3 now
Apparently I'm wrong and Pop_Os uses systemD-boot not GRUB, which is surprising to me because unless things have changed I've always thought of systemD-boot as being underpowered for a lot of use cases.
If I'm reading the wiki correctly here, I think it's saying systemd-boot cannot launch windows because it's on another drive? https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/systemd-boot#Boot_from_another_disk
But on the other hand it's interesting that it's able to "see" the windows partition so I might be completely wrong.
this is indeed, pretty damn weird. I'm going to go with uninstalling pop os, and getting windows first on the smaller drive, then getting either KDE Neon or Linux Mint on the bigger one. kinda sucks, i wish i couldve just installed but it doesn't seem like there is anything i can do. thank you so much for the help, comrade.