I’ve got a very weird system going on here, as a bottom-of-the-barrel server that’s a hodge podge of parts. The problem, is that the motherboard is a Chinese x99 that doesn’t support booting from m2 slots. And I got a sweet Intel Optane H10 32Gb + 500GB on the cheap.
Is it possible to install a bootloader on an HDD, but then have Windows (or Ubuntu, I’m desperate to get this to work) on the NVME SSD? A workaround, basically.
Or is there a better way? I’d love to make use of the fast cache for booting and loading everything fast, rather than the 3 minutes it takes on HDD.
Windows: I’ve tried and failed many times, it really wants bootmgfw.efi to be on the same disk as the C: drive. I had it work once I think, and an update destroyed it.
Linux will let you do anything. Add to the boot loader root=/dev/nvme0n1p... with the partition number, or preferably use a FS UUID: root=UUID=..., or lvm2 vg, or zfs dataset, or …
I opted to get a cheap 15 pound SSD, and put Windows on it. My plan is to use the Intel Optane drive as my actual working drive (install requirements, source code, programs, etc). But a new problem!
Windows will randomly choose to see either the 32GB cache drive, OR the 512GB flash drive. So every reboot, it’s a toss-up whether or not I’ve lost the changes I made to one of the two drives on the NVME thingy itself.
…How do I stop this from happening? It’s really awful. I want just one of the drives to be present 100% of the time, I don’t care if I lose one. Though ideally, it’d be the 32GB cache drive that is always present.
Yeah that’s me, it’s been so long since I’ve installed Windows that I didn’t even think about it and ended up with the bootloader on some other disk that now I have to leave in the system (if I want to continue being lazy at least).
How hard would it be for Windows to just ask where you would like the bootloader to be installed?
