I added more hard drives to my windows PC to dual boot as a test, then added another drive to actually play since I was enjoying Linux. My third OS isn’t bootable any more. What have I done wrong?
Started off with Windows 10 on a SATA drive with an M.2 drive for more data.
Added a 2Gb NVME with Debian - this has become my daily driver. I haven’t been to windows more than a few minutes a week.
Added another 250Gb SATA drive to test and play with another Debian install so I don’t break my daily driver.
Tried today to boot into the test OS and It’s just missing from GRUB? It doesn’t show up as a bootable drive in my UEFI BIOS either, though the drive itself is seen.
From KDE Partition Manager in my daily driver Debian, the drives are:
/dev/nvme01 - the daily driver Debian
/dev/sda - the Windows OS drive
/dev/sdb - the windows M.2 drive
/dev/sdc - the test Debian drive (not booting)
I would appreciate help. While there’s not much on that drive, I would like to continue my playing around.
Thanks in advance.
I’m thinking you may have updated grub at some stage from Deb, and didn’t have the test OS mounted at the time, or os-prober not enabled :- therefore not detected when grub.cfg was regenerated.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB#Detecting_other_operating_systems
https://wiki.debian.org/Grub#Dual_BootI ended up using rEFInd myself, as it does automatic OS detection/scans for bootable partitions.
I didn’t update GRUB intentionally, but who knows. Installing and reading docs, thanks for the tip.
Boot problems are really tricky to fix on the computer that’s having them.
If any of your other OS’s still boot, then use them to download a live ISO of your preferred linux distro, and write it to a USB stick.
Then you can diagnose the problem using a new boot environment that doesn’t rely on the main disk.
Thanks. I haven’t really tried to fix it very hard, but that’s an obvious step I should have tried.
If the Debians you installed weren’t Live ISOs, then I recommend Arch or Artix for CLI, and Manjaro or Ubuntu for GUI.
You’ll have to mount the drives,
chroot
into the one on the drive that has the EFI partition, thengrub-install
andgrub-mkconfig
into the EFI partition.