Hey guys, i bought a new laptop and i want to dual boot win 10 and opensuse.

I had to order a hard drive caddy, to swap out the optical drive to be able to add a second hdd. I was reading that with UEFI, its best to unplug the windows hdd, to minimize the risk of breaking the windows bootloader, during linux install

I have not received the hdd caddy yet, so i figured if I was going to disconnect the windows drive during install anyway, why not just remove the drive, install linux on the other hard drive and run it for a while until i can have both together.

my question is, when i install both hard drives, both drives should now have an EFI boot partition. If i set the Linux drive as the default 1st boot device, i should be able to run grub-update, and detect the windows partition and have both bootable from the grub menu, correct?


EDIT: secure boot, fast boot, etc is all disabled.

EFI is designed to allow multiple operating systems to coexist on a single drive.
GRUB is a boot loader - it allows you to choose which OS you want to boot.

It is not necessary to have multiple disks - but the extra space is useful.

the windows hdd is a 256gb ssd, its already little space. So i definitely want to use 2 drives, and i also don't want to change the windows hard drive, if i have to send it in for repair(still under warranty).

so your internal hd is a windows ssd and the other drive is an add-on through the optical sata connector? that is fine. you just have to reconfigure your bios to boot from the linux drive. grub, when you install, if you put both efi, will auto find the windows and add it as a mount option. then as long as you have it booting from the linux os, you wont have to worry about that because the linux bootloader will be doing the work.

1 members found this post helpful.

I like to have drives fully able to boot. Therefor I'd make sure each has all that it needs to load. When you do sometime update grub or kernel your distro may then include grub entry for windows.

I'd boot from bios drive selection.

I am personally comfortable going this route (baldur_1's suggestion). I haven't attempted using the firmware as suggested by jefro, but if your computer supports that functionality, it would be worth exploring as well.

Cheers,