Hey everyone, I finally decided to get the 1TB expansion card and dual boot Ubuntu on it with Windows 10 remaining on my internal SSD. I’m not a newbie to Linux or dual-booting with Windows, but it has been a few years so I’d like a sanity check.
I want to install as much of Ubuntu on the expansion card as possible, except I want GRUB to be on the Windows drive. Do I need to do any particular partitioning, or will the installer take care of putting GRUB in with the Windows bootloader? I’ve been searching around online but haven’t found anything that really answered this for me, and I’d like some reassurance before I pull the trigger on this.
Alright, so considering my eagerness to get this working and the late/early hour, I decided to go ahead and do the dual-boot install after finding this guide on AskUbuntu. I gave the Ubuntu installation it’s own EFI partition for its boot loader on the expansion card, so theoretically if I decide to repurpose the expansion card or otherwise remove it from the computer, Windows 10 should function normally (although I anticipate minor UEFI shenanigans). I wasn’t anticipating MokManager to pop up after the installation was complete (wasn’t a thing when I did this last) and while I was searching around for an explanation it timed out, so hopefully that doesn’t become an issue down the road.
Anyway, that’s where I’m at, in case anyone (or myself) gets confused and stumbles on this post with similar questions.
I cannot speak to what Windoze will do as that company and its software is all but banished from my house. However, when in the Linux side, I have found the efibootmgr utility to be incredibly useful in diagnosing and fixing the EFI boot order and entries.
I would also highly recommend the excellent rEFInd boot manager in general. I have found it especially useful to place it as the fallback boot option on the esp partition at /EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI .