The boot process is behaving oddly in Ubuntu.
The boot process is behaving oddly in Ubuntu.
The boot screen is still displayed even without a connected hard drive. When you remove the 500 GB HDD, the Ubuntu menu remains visible. Selecting it shows a black screen, but once the drive is connected, it boots normally. This behavior has changed since you removed the 500 GB drive. Previously, the option disappeared, but now it stays active. You’re considering switching to Manjaro KDE and are concerned about BIOS settings and activation keys. The current setup with 385GB Windows storage and 80GB for Ubuntu feels unstable. You’re thinking of freeing up space by deleting the Ubuntu partition and expanding it, but the boot menu still poses a risk. Are you worried this will affect your installation or activation process?
You might have set up grub on your SSD before. For installing Manjaro, this boot menu isn't crucial—Manjaro can generate or replace it as you wish. You can remove the 80GB Ubuntu disk and shrink the 385GB Windows partition to around 250GB or more (this depends on how much of the space is occupied and where the files are stored).
I put the newest storage device in my system in January 2020. I used Ubuntu back in 2018, and I haven’t updated it since then.