Booting from USB drive handling

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
1

So far, I’m very happy with my Framework Laptop 16.
There’s just one issue I encountered, where I’d like to know, if there’s a better way of handling it:

For a dedicated work-related project, I prepared a bootable USB NVMe enclosure with the latest Ubuntu-LTS based Linux Mint 22 to have it separated from my private system and to be able to use it from other computers/laptops, too.
Everything worked fine after setup, but when I unplugged it to use one of my private OSes from the internal drives, it booted into the grub shell, as if the boot loader got corrupted.

Looking further into this, I noticed the drive being listed as a boot target inside the BIOS (v3.03), even when it’s unplugged. Turning it off as a boot target there, lets me boot into my private OSes without any issues, but when I want to use the external drive again, I have to re-enable it every time in the BIOS before being able to boot from it and deactivate it again before being able to use my private OSes.

As I’ve never experienced anything similar with my previous computers and laptops, I’m curious if this is a bug in the BIOS. In case it isn’t, as it’s getting quite tedious over time, I wonder if is there any better way to handle this issue?

2

Well, external drives tend to change slots.
For a USB device to boot, make sure you install grub onto the USB drive too.
Then you need a boot loader that can detect dynamically boot devices. I bet you can do that on the framework devices to scan for boot devices at boot.
But, you can also look into refind - The rEFInd Boot Manager which does a faily nice job in detecting boot devices.

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3

+1 for rEFInd. Absolutely the most flexible, set it and forget it bootloader I have used, especially if you’re not playing in the secure boot world.

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Yes, the rEFInd Boot Manager is indeed what I’ve been looking for. Sadly, it’s not very descriptive out of the box, so I need to configure it manually. For example, I do have two Linux and two Windows-Installations, one for work and one for entertainment each, and you can’t tell which of the windows ones he’s going to boot, because the descriptions are identical.