I originally had 1TB NVMe (Sabrent Rocket) with Manjaro installed on it and a secondary 480GB Sata SSD for Steam games. My purpose for this system was to add a secondary NVMe for installing on it Win10/Win11 and keep the two systems separated but on the same machine to be used at my convenience and, possibly, sharing the same Sata SSD drive for having Steam games installed once for both systems (this is now a second-priority problem but please tell me whether it is possible or not to have a disk to be read both by Win and Linux at once, thanks)
Incoming issue:
I finally got the secondary NVMe (Fanxiang 2TB) after several months of using Manjaro without issues (I mean, generally speaking). In a probably quite awkward move (), I merely added it to the mobo and installed Win10 with a USB drive, without removing the Manjaro NVMe.
Obviously, since I’m writing this, something went wrong and now I can’t get my Manjaro OS to work again.
In particular, if I try to boot the system removing the Win10 NVMe (Fanxiang), I get two possible behaviours, depending on the two different settings available in the BIOS for the Manjaro NVMe (don’t know why the first one should exist for a Linux drive but I have a suspect, read further to know):
If the boot setting in the BIOS is set to the option “Windows Boot Manager [Sabrent Rocket etc]”: a blue screen appears showing an error of file not found for booting Win10 (NOT BSOD)
If the boot setting in the BIOS is set to the option “Sabrent Rocket etc” (without Windows Boot Manager): I get the message of no bootable drive, insert one and press any key to reboot, or something similar
Meanwhile, Win10 works fine, but exclusively when both NVMe are installed [as long as in the BIOS the Windows Boot Manager [Sabrent Rocket] is the first boot option, even though, in Win10, the only disk present in the directory “This PC” is the Fanxiang (the other disks can be seen in Disk Management, but they result empty even though they are not). M.2 slots make no difference].
Now, I suspect that during the Win10 installation, since I didn’t remove the Manjaro NVMe, the process randomly created the booting file(/s) on this one, reason why it is seen as a Windows drive and it is necessary for booting Win10. But why can’t I access Manjaro anyhow? How can I solve the situation?
Thank you very much for reading all this and for the help!
Windows tends to change the default boot loader, reset the boot menu in uefi and change the uefi settings. That happens on first install, recovery or major quarterly updates or yearly upgrades to major version.
Enter the uefi settings and check that raid0 is turned off, as well as secure boot. Then start Windows and Disable the fast boot in the windows power settings. Finally, boot from the manjaro flash drive and reinstall grub, which also restores the menu.
Disconnecting a drive doesn’t really help, because even though that will force win to make another esp, it will still mess with efi settings.
This is specific to the BIOS or UEFI on your computer, so you’ll need to consult the motherboard manual for that.
There will commonly be an option to always show the UEFI boot manager.
It depends on the filesystem. GNU/Linux can read and write to NTFS, but there are always problems with that, so best is to use exfat, which is supported by both operating systems.
If you format it as exfat, it should be plug & play. With ntfs there will be issues, and ext4 is not supported by Wintendo — there is a third-party Wintendo driver for it, but I think it’s not being maintained anymore, and it’ll probably give you problems farther down the line.
Before closing I just wanted to ask this: why the BIOS is still showing the Windows Boot Manager on the Manjaro NVMe (see image)? And to enter Win10 OS I still need to use that option, though the system is on the other drive
It’s because of the EFI variables. They’re not stored on disk but in the CMOS memory of the UEFI firmware, and they can be manipulated from within GNU/Linux by way of the efibootmgr command. See the manual…
Now that’s not fair, is it? @Teo is the one who deserves the solution.
For future reference however, try sticking to one issue per thread. It makes it easier for people to look for solutions by way of the forum’s search engine.
It does, actually. If you click someone’s avatar or you look at their profile page, it will list the number of solutions they have in their name.
This is a good indicator of how experienced someone is, and how active they are at helping other people. It’s not an absolute indicator of course, because some people are very knowledgeable but spend less time helping out others on the forum, and others are more active but perhaps less experienced.
In addition to that, there’s also the Leaderboard, which shows you how active people are on the forum, irrespective of what they’re active in. Someone who asks a lot of questions can also score high, of course, simply by virtue of their frequency of posting (or liking posts by others, or receiving likes, et al.)
), I merely added it to the mobo and installed Win10 with a USB drive, without removing the Manjaro NVMe.
