I have an M.2 drive I’m using to run Pop OS, and a western digital hard drive along with a Samsung ssd. I am trying to install windows 10 from a USB boot drive to the hard drive or ssd but it keeps failing during install and automatically booting me up into pop os. Whats worse is windows setup has also somehow made it on to my M.2. Is there any way to install it on SSD or HDD without removing the M.2? Also how can i identify and remove the windows boot loader from my M.2 before it causes issues? Any help would be much appreciated.
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In my experience, Win10 will write part of itself to every available storage device in a system.
When you want Win10 to co-exist with any other OS, remove all but the drive you want to install Win10 to.
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Good to know, thanks. Any way to get it off the M.2 without wiping the drive and reinstalling linux?
Windows likely overwrote the bootloader, so this might help: https://support.system76.com/articles/bootloader/
Just turn the m.2 off in bios and install windows if you’re worried. It might overwrite the Linux bootloader on update if the m.2 is seen as the first disk by the board. In that case you just reinstall grub via live USB. I’ve never had windows touch any drive besides the one I installed it to.
I have also had Windows 10 install its bootloader to the EFI partition on an M.2 drive, without asking permission, when Windows was being installed to another drive. This was a while back, so perhaps has been changed - but I always disable (in the UEFI) or remove all other drives when installing Windows 10. The UEFIs I have used do not support turning off M.2 drives.