Dual boot on laptop with two hard drives

[mefisto]

Greetings all,

per another thread, a laptop - Lenovo w540, with two video-cards should work with Open BSD. As also mentioned therein, I need Windows for applications that do not have an Open BSD counterpart, thus a dual boot, if possible, would be desirable, unless it is overly complicated and fragile, [I]e.g.[/I,] failing upon upgrade of either OS.

The laptop has two hard-drives, which would ideally allow installation of each of the OSs on its own drive.

The UEFI BIOS has an option to select one of the hard-drives. Although this appears to be an option, it would require to interrupt the boot, make the change and restart. Thus, I was wondering whether there would possible to have such an option to appear during the boot.

The other (potential) problem is, that as I vaguely remember, the Windows install did not offer the option on which hard-drive to install the OS.

Any help would be appreciated.

Kindest regards,

M

[jggimi]

I have a laptop with two drives: both EFI. One with OpenBSD installed, the other with Win10. Each drive uses its own bootloader. By default, it will boot OpenBSD from power-on. If I want to boot Win10, I use a BIOS function key during power on self-test to bring up a boot selection screen, where I select the Win10 drive.


To ensure Win10 installed where I wanted it to go, the OpenBSD drive was made unavailable. I cannot recall if I used a BIOS setting to disable the drive or physically disconnected it.

[hd77]

Originally Posted by mefisto

Greetings all,

per another thread, a laptop - Lenovo w540, with two video-cards should work with Open BSD. As also mentioned therein, I need Windows for applications that do not have an Open BSD counterpart, thus a dual boot, if possible, would be desirable, unless it is overly complicated and fragile, [I]e.g.[/I,] failing upon upgrade of either OS.

The laptop has two hard-drives, which would ideally allow installation of each of the OSs on its own drive.

The UEFI BIOS has an option to select one of the hard-drives. Although this appears to be an option, it would require to interrupt the boot, make the change and restart. Thus, I was wondering whether there would possible to have such an option to appear during the boot.

The other (potential) problem is, that as I vaguely remember, the Windows install did not offer the option on which hard-drive to install the OS.

Any help would be appreciated.

Kindest regards,

M

greettings,

as i did multiboot on several laptops, the linux grub's helped me a lot, it's the first one to get the bios/efi booted in, thus it permits to choose windows, linux, bsd or others unixies..
i multiboot always with grub. efi, or bios.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

The FAQ has instructions for creating a Windows boot menu entry for OpenBSD:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting

I think that might be for non-UEFI systems but it's worth a try.

OpenBSD uses /EFI/Boot/boox64.efi on the EFI system partition to boot up in UEFI mode. If you share the ESP with Windows it might be possible to add it to the Windows boot menu using the bcdedit command but I don't know how (sorry).

[mefisto]

Hi jggimi,

thank you for the reply. Yes, the UEFI/BIOS switching is a possibility, though, as noted, I would prefer not to enter the UEFI/BIOS; I am afraid of inadvertently changing other settings. However, maybe it is not so bothersome as one of the OSs will be used most of the time.

I like your idea of disconnecting one of the drive during the installation.

Hi hd77,

thank you for the reply. I found GRUB during my search, but it seems that people have issues with making it work consistently. In fact, the FAQ Haed-on_the_Stick posted, notes in particular: "GRUB is reported to usually fail."

Hi Head-on_the_Stick,

yes, as you noted, the FAQ specifically recites MBR.

Perhaps I will stick with switching by invoking UEFI/BIOS for now.

Kindest regards,

M