Caddy to replace DVD drive with hard drive

[Aughey]

The dvd in my laptop is unreliable. Has anyone replaced one using a caddy with a 2nd hard drive instead. This should allow me to have mint and windows on srperate drives. I find windows updates keep killing grub in dual boot

[Jo-con-Ël]

Yes, I did it several years ago with a SilverStone Treasure SST-TS06 2.5" SSD/HDD conversion tray.

[GELvdH]

There are also several reliable USB external SSD drives available you may want to look at.

[Aughey]

I have a caddy ordered. Can you arrange it so the grub is on the mint disk? If so what is the best way to do that? Windows will be sure to mess it up otherwise

[Jo-con-Ël]

There wouldn't be any problem booting from that secondary disk, but explain in details what you get now (I mean systems already installed on internal disk, if UEFI/BIOS mode...) and what you're proposing (install from scratch windows/Mint on first/secondary disk, move/clone current Mint installation to secondary disk....)

If installing from scratch, i.e. once you installed Mint on secondary disk, you will be able to set that secondary disk first on Boot Order priority in case of BIOS system (old computers)/Legacy boot mode (this Toshiba satellite Mint is booting on BIOS mode but also created an EFI partition you don't need) or ubuntu option in case of UEFI boot mode (this HP laptop).

Linux Mint 21.X installer will (try to) install in both BIOS and UEFI mode so you need to be sure you are installing on BIOS Legacy mode (See this guide) or apply a workaround a known bug in case of installing on UEFI mode on secondary disk in the same way as full install on USB.

[Aughey]

. My laptop is a Toshiba C850. It has uefi and CSM modes in the bios. Legacy is also present. Dual booting has ceased functioning on the current ssd. II can only access windows. My usual trick of removing the battery and power connector then inserting the psu and pressing the on switch no longer restores a grub screen. It's still windows. Im hoping installing a second drive will restore it.

[Jo-con-Ël]

It uses to happen when dual booting with windows. No need to reset BIOS. From time to time you need to get into computer' s Setup to put back Linux Mint UEFI option (ubuntu) on Boot Order Priority first place.

You can confirm it is not that problem (default option change on boot order) trying to boot ubuntu option from computer's boot menu (F12).

You'd better create a new topic with that problem and booting Linux Mint Live USB/DVD provide inxi -Fxxxzr, sudo parted -l, sudo blkid and sudo efibootmgr -v results.

[AndyMH]

The dvd in my laptop is unreliable. Has anyone replaced one using a caddy with a 2nd hard drive instead. This should allow me to have mint and windows on srperate drives. I find windows updates keep killing grub in dual boot

I have four thinkpad T430, in all of them the DVD drive has been replaced with a caddy + HDD. I have a separate copy of mint installed on the HDD as a backup. How easy it is to make sure grub gets installed to the HDD depends on your boot mode. Provide the outputs requested by Jo-con-Ël.

[Aughey]

Hooray the caddy arrived. I started by removing the current dual booting SSD and used Gparted to blank it after I put all its transfer data on a thumbdrive then inserted the new blank HDD drive in the main hard drive slot. I then installed Windows 10 onto this drive. I then removed the fresh Windows 10 drive and transferred it into the caddy. I next nstalled the caddy into the laptop and reinserted the original SSD then installed a fresh copy of Mint 21.3 via USB onto it using the whole drive. This seems to have worked fine

[Aughey]

Hooray the caddy arrived. I started by removing the current dual booting SSD and used Gparted to blank it after I put all its transfer data on a thumbdrive then inserted the new blank HDD drive in the main hard drive slot. I then installed Windows 10 onto this drive. I then removed the fresh Windows 10 drive and transferred it into the caddy. I next nstalled the caddy into the laptop and reinserted the original SSD then installed a fresh copy of Mint 21.3 via USB onto it using the whole drive. This seems to have worked fine

[Aughey]

One question niggles. I used the standard installer from the USB. How do I tell exactly which drive it installed mint 21.3 onto. My intention was to get this installed on the blanked SSD and leaving windows 10 on the HDD in the caddy.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/n5BNPfd8MciG9vdVA

https://photos.app.goo.gl/JHkcfdYn1JqECUHj7

[diabolicbg]

Hooray the caddy arrived. I started by removing the current dual booting SSD and used Gparted to blank it after I put all its transfer data on a thumbdrive then inserted the new blank HDD drive in the main hard drive slot. I then installed Windows 10 onto this drive. I then removed the fresh Windows 10 drive and transferred it into the caddy. I next nstalled the caddy into the laptop and reinserted the original SSD then installed a fresh copy of Mint 21.3 via USB onto it using the whole drive. This seems to have worked fine

You've done beautifully - this is the best way to dual boot! The second picture is the LM installation.
You can physically identify them very easily - put one in the caddy, and have the other drive off, and see what loads.

[AndyMH]

One question niggles. I used the standard installer from the USB. How do I tell exactly which drive it installed mint 21.3 onto.

Boot mint, open a terminal and df. It will tell you what partitions are mounted where. I suspect you may have the linux bootloader, grub, installed on your internal drive. Look for the partition mounting at /boot/efi.

[Aughey]

I have been doing a lot of installing on windows 10 and apart from some strange screen print appearing during one reboot which disappeared completely after I unplugged an external usb CD drive dual booting is so far behaving impeccably.Here is what df returned:

bill@bill-SATELLITE-C850-19D:~$ df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
tmpfs 1624560 1516 1623044 1% /run
/dev/sda5 982861244 17326480 915534484 2% /
tmpfs 8122792 0 8122792 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
efivarfs 88 61 23 73% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
/dev/sda1 523244 6240 517004 2% /boot/efi
tmpfs 1624556 1648 1622908 1% /run/user/1000
bill@bill-SATELLITE-C850-19D

[AndyMH]

Looks okay, / and your EFI partition on the same drive.