I dual boot windows on the main ssd and use linux mint on the expansion card. I was just using my laptop and suddenly my mint crashed and now whenever I try to boot with the expansion card in it just displays a black screen and wont let me go into bios I dont know what to do.
A boot drive should not stop you from entering the BIOS - the BIOS option should kick in before all boot drives. Can you not press F2 in the machine’s boot-up phase?
For the avoidance of doubt, your title refers to a bootable systems screen. This may be a question of semantics, but your BIOS and a bootable systems screen are two different things. That said, the FW BIOS does seem to have a bootable drives menu. I think you have to hit F1 for this.
If you shut the machine down and then remove the expansion card, does the main SSD boot?
I definetly shouldve added more detail. I can go into my main ssd if I take out the expansion card, but whenever I try to turn on the laptop with it in it just black screens with the keyboard being unresponsive. Also, if I try to plug it in after going into my main sdd it doesnt show the storage at all.
Edit: I can also make a video later explaining what I mean its just late for me right now
Another thing to add is that if a bootable drive offers a boot menu, this is normally not the boot menu offered by the BIOS. It will usually have its own e.g. GRUB.
Thus, strictly speaking, I think you should find that your BIOS’s bootable drives menu will still work, even if your bootable drive’s boot menu does not. So I would do two things, with your expansion card in place:
- find out how to get into the system’s boot menu (I believe this is F1 tapped at the right time in the boot phase)
- check that your expansion card has a higher boot priority than the internal NVMe drive
If the drive is plugged in late, Windows may not see it as a valid drive because it will be formatted with a Linux drive format e.g. ext4. However Windows should see the hardware for it, e.g. in a Disks settings dialogue box.
Yes please. 