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.
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