Install Windows 10 After Mint Onto Separate Drive

[Kendoori]

I'm about to pull the trigger on installing Windows 10 alongside Mint 20.2 on my Thinkpad T480. I bought a spare M.2 drive to do this onto, and I am expecting to first disconnect my Mint SSD, then install Windows from USB stick.

The system uses UEFI. My understanding is that I will end up with a messed-up GRUB after I reconnect the Mint drive and that I will need to repair GRUB to make Mint bootable in the new world.

I have a boot-repair-disk USB key. Will this just be a question of booting from this and repairing in a Live session.

Would appreciate any guidance. I have good TimeShift snapshots, and good backups. I'm a little nervous, and don't want to spend a zillion hours recovering

[mikaelrask]

hey boot the windows iso install it to the separate drive. then plug in the other ssd boot up to linux mint. from the terminal run

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

is to my knowledge all you need to to to get grub to detect the windows partition.

good luck

[mikeflan]

I'm interested in hearing about this myself. Am I right that grub just allows you to select what to boot without going into the bios. Even if grub is messed up you can go into the bios boot menu and select the drive you want to boot.

[AndyMH]

I'm about to pull the trigger on installing Windows 10 alongside Mint 20.2 on my Thinkpad T480. I bought a spare M.2 drive to do this onto, and I am expecting to first disconnect my Mint SSD, then install Windows from USB stick.

The system uses UEFI. My understanding is that I will end up with a messed-up GRUB after I reconnect the Mint drive and that I will need to repair GRUB to make Mint bootable in the new world.

The easiest route is to disconnect the SSD before installing win (and you will have to get inside the T480 anyway). But you should not have to repair grub - it will be living in its own EFI partition on the SSD.

I would expect win to put itself top of the boot list in BIOS so that would need changing and when you boot mint again a sudo update-grub should add it to your grub menu.

Might be able to do this by simply turning off the esp and boot flags on the efi partition in your ssd before the win install (using gparted booting from a live usb - you won't be able to do it booting normally). That should mean that win will ignore it and install itself on the M.2 and create an efi partition on it. Note - I've only ever done this the other way round - win first.

I assume you want both the M.2 and the SDD be capable of booting independently.

Personally, if the M.2 is pcie I'd be tempted to put mint on it and win on the SSD. Should be faster, but have to say in the real world can't say I noticed any significant difference when I switched my desktop from SSD to M.2 nvme pcie

[Kendoori]

Progress report... In Thinkpad land, all M.2 are not the same. The drive I bought was SATA and was not recognized by the BIOS or the Windows installer when installed in the WWAN slot. Some folks over in the Thinkpad Subreddit have suggested an M.2 Nvme drive as an alternative. Just ordered one and will update after I've gotten it.

[rickNS]

I'm interested in hearing about this myself. Am I right that grub just allows you to select what to boot without going into the bios.

You are right. I just fired up this computer and took a picture for you.

[rickNS]

Progress report... In Thinkpad land, all M.2 are not the same. The drive I bought was SATA and was not recognized by the BIOS or

I'm a little surprised that the wrong type would "plug in" OK.
I just added an M.2 drive to my T450, but it does take the sata type. Don't know what model the change was made to the nvme type.
I put Linux on my M.2, and left the factory win10 on the regular ssd.

It all went smoothly ... except for one thing, and now I would NOT recommend disabling the battery in BIOS, like EVERYBODY says to do, just unplug it, or be careful.

The 240 GB Transcend drive is where Linux lives.
Drives: HDD Total Size: 496.1GB (1.8% used)
ID-1: /dev/sda model: SAMSUNG_MZ7LN256 size: 256.1GB
ID-2: /dev/sdb model: TS240GMTS420S size: 240.1GB

Frankly, and this is just if it were me (and it's not) I'd probably not update grub (assuming you use linux the most) that way you won't have to see the grub screen every time you boot. Make the linux drive higher priority than the windows drive, and on the occasional time when you want to boot win10 use the BIOS boot order method.
Since I installed Linux after windows, and didn't think to remove the win10 drive I'm stuck seeing the grub menu every boot, and it will be pretty rare I ever boot windows. On second thought those 5 extra seconds once a week or so won't change my life much. Sorry for the babble I'm sure when you get the right one everything will work out.

[Kendoori]

Update. I was successful with installing this M.2 PCIe NVMe https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B094PHHL75? ... ct_details

In case this is of value to others, here's what I did:

1-Create a Windows 10 bootable install USB
2-Cracked the T480 open and unplugged the main Mint SSD and installed the M/2 drive in the WWAN
3-Booted the USB and installed onto the new M.2. Rebooted and updated with various apps, patches, etc...
4-Shut down the machine and cracked it back open and reconnected the Mint drive
5-Rebooted just to see what would happen and it booted into Windows by default (I just let it rip, as I wanted to see the behavior).
6-Shut the machine down and booted using the BIOS boot choice selector and chose "Ubuntu" (for Mint) and all booted OK.
7-For safety reasons, I did:

Code: Select all

sudo update-grub

8-Rebooted into BIOS and changed the UEFI boot order so that Mint was first ("Ubuntu"). Removed extraneous entries from the list
9-Rebooted and let it rip, and GRUB appeared by default without any key presses. I let it boot into Mint (where I am now).

Except for not having the right M.2 drive initially, this was fast and fairly painless.

[AndyMH]

Assuming you want mint to be able to read/write your ntfs partition(s), turn off fast boot in win.

[Kendoori]

Assuming you want mint to be able to read/write your ntfs partition(s), turn off fast boot in win.

BTW, I did this; however, I wondered if it mattered if I don't mount the NTFS in Mint, does this matter?

I've gotten to the point, whereby I don't store much locally, so the need to have a shared partition, is not important to me.

[AndyMH]

BTW, I did this; however, I wondered if it mattered if I don't mount the NTFS in Mint, does this matter?

No, they will appear in the devices pane in your file manager. The only thing I would do is add labels to your ntfs partition(s), that way if you click on one in your file manager it will mount using the label, e.g. /media/you/mylabel, instead of using the UUID - a bit more user friendly.

[Kendoori]

BTW, I ran Windows 10 for about 24 hours without rebooting into Mint. I was immediately futzing and removing stuff

I found that I kept trying to get it to work like my Mint Cinnamon set up (e.g. I don't keep a bottom taskbar in Mint, and have trimmed down my tray and have it tucked in the upper right (and essentially keep a Gnome style dash on the left). I have grown to dig the whole minimal clutter thing desktop-wise. I realized after a while that this was totally unproductive and stopped myself!

All that said, I think this is a good technique if you have a reason to run Windows natively that keeps church and state separate.