Bootloader located on separate drives—Windows 10 and Pop_OS—is where it resides.
Bootloader located on separate drives—Windows 10 and Pop_OS—is where it resides.
So this seems like a rather simple issue but I thought it worth going through. About two weeks ago I brought back my old HDD to use as a Linux boot device. I decided to set up Pop_OS 22.04 LTS using the installation guide’s suggestion, which means it was installed automatically without me doing anything. My system also has Windows 10 on a completely separate SSD drive. There are two more drives available, but they’re just for storage and don’t hold any operating system. I didn’t search for a bootloader myself—I’m okay switching to Pop_OS via BIOS—but now I need to perform a fresh installation and my question is: where did the bootloader or EFI partition go? I ran DiskPart on both drives and saw two different EFI partitions, which matches what I expected since the HDD might fail after years of use. However, Pop_OS didn’t prompt me about where to place its bootloader. I looked at some tutorials, but most people used their own setup instead of the recommended one, which I’d rather avoid if possible. Do you know what’s happening here? I just want both drives to have separate bootloaders so they don’t conflict with each other. It’s not about having dual boot inside a single EFI partition, but ensuring the Windows partition stays untouched.
Typically, if a drive already has an EFI partition, it will incorporate its loader into it. To ensure independence, disconnect all drives except the one you plan to install during setup—this applies to both Windows and Ubuntu versions. Even with manual installation in Ubuntu, selecting a bootloader location doesn't always follow that decision.
My point is that each part seems distinct in some way. I didn’t disconnect my Windows drive during the Pop_OS installation, yet an EFI partition still appeared on that drive, leaving me confused about what actually happened. Pop_OS doesn’t rely on Grub; it uses its own bootloader. I think it might be switching between them, but I’m not entirely sure right now.
When each drive has an EFI partition, you get two distinct bootloaders and separate operating systems. To avoid manually changing boot drives in the BIOS, you can integrate Windows into your Pop_OS boot manager and set Pop_OS as the top priority there. This ensures that if the Pop_OS installation is present, your PC will start there, allowing you to decide whether to chainload Windows or boot directly to Pop_OS, while removing the drive will immediately switch to Windows.
Certainly, just to clarify, if you need absolute certainty about a separate bootloader for Pop_OS, you should eliminate the Windows partition during the installation process.
If your current Pop_OS setup works, you can often check the disk mounts in the terminal and identify which one points to /boot (like /dev/hda# or /sda). Compare that with the drive assignment for your root partition or the one containing Windows. This is usually the best starting point. With UEFI it tends to place the installation on the same drive and add 'Ubuntu' to the boot options, though some systems might also install GRUB on the first boot device instead.