System
A new Acer Predator laptop that came with Windows 10 installed. It includes two hard drives. One is a ssd where windows 10 is installed and the other is a hdd. UEFI secure boot is enabled by default. RAID was also enabled for the hdd by default.
Goal
I am having trouble getting a multi-boot setup on a new laptop. I would like this to work in one of two ways (with Ubuntu install(s) on the HDD):
- Multi-boot options at startup that allow me to choose between the currently installed Windows system or the Ubuntu system(s).
- Use BIOS to change boot order between the Windows Boot Manager and the HDD. If booting using the Windows Boot Manager, it would boot directly to windows 10. If booting using the HDD, it would show me a grub menu with my various Ubuntu installs to choose from on the HDD.
Setup
I have already split the HDD into four partitions. I did this from within Windows. Originally, I was attempting to use VirtualBox to run virtual machines from these partitions, so I would like to keep the most important one intact until this is working, if possible. (i.e. only create a new partition table and blow away the existing partitions if it's the only way to get what I'm after). I also changed the HDD from RAID to AHCI so that I could see it in the boot order options.
What I've tried
The first thing I tried was just installing Ubuntu on one of the partitions of the HDD. I told it to look in /dev/sdb
for the boot loader. With UEFI enabled, I go into Windows 10 even if I have the SSD higher in the boot order. Without UEFI enabled (legacy mode), it says no operating systems are found.
I then attempted to switch one of the existing partitions to be /boot
. Same end result.
UEFI Secure Boot
I have seen comments and posts about 'disabling' UEFI secure boot, but I am unable to do that. I can switch to legacy mode, but using UEFI without secure boot eludes me. I have tried following a few guides on how to do it in Windows 10, but none of them have worked.
I'm also very unsure of how much of the problem is Secure Boot and how much is UEFI.
Also, there is an option in the boot order that is only there when using UEFI (Windows Boot Manager). This seems to be the only thing that I can get the system to recognize when booting.
Help?
The previous times that I've set up multi-boot systems, it was either completely from scratch (machines I built myself with no pre-installed OS) or 'it just worked' (in the case of my 4-year old MacBook). To the best of my knowledge, I've never had to wrangle with UEFI and I have no idea what the 'Windows Boot Manager' is.