Setting up PopOS bootloader
dual-booting with Windows 11 on a different drive
date of creation: | last update:
Steps to set Pop!_OS bootloader correctly in an installation on a desktop computer with 2 separated physical drive (SSD) of which one already installed with Windows 11
Situation
- a desktop computer with 2 separated physical drives SSD
- 1° drive has Windows 11 already installed
- 2° drive was just installed with a fresh Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS GNU/Linux operative system
- at boot I have to manually change the boot option and order priority from the motherboard's BIOS each time I power on the computer instead of having a bootloader selection for entering either PopOS or Windows
Useful findings
Basically I discovered that, differently from my previous experiment with dualbooting windows and linux (on a same physical drive), the major point is that PopOS uses systemd-bootloader instead of GRUB.
Solution
I've consequently had to either install GRUB (not recommended by many -although personally the less I use systemd the happier I am...) or modify the systemd-bootloader.
I did the latter by following this video guide [yes, it's a youtube frontend, if it doesn't work find the video by replacing the part of the url before "watch..."] (TW: the anime clips are arguably sexist(?)!) then I simply had to select the "UEFI OS" boot priority as the top in the order of the motherboard's BIOS to make it load automatically.
When (and if) I remember it I'll just add the steps in a written form in this blogpost ;)