Installing Debian 12 on a second SSD on a Windows 10 PC

[Anon-i-mous]

Hello fellow members. I am brand new to this board and have been using Debian off and on for years, however, I still consider myself a newbie. I am unable to find info regarding installing Debian alone to a second hard drive with Windows already installed on a separate drive. Previously I have dual booted Windows/Linux from the same drive or run it from a USB drive. I do not want to dual boot Windows and Debian from the same disk if I can avoid it.

I can find noting about how and which boot loader would handle this setup. I feel certain many have done this before me. Any help is greatly appreciated. Below is more detail on the hardware side if needed.

I want to install Debian on a Samsung EVO 870 Plus SSD on a PCIe x16 slot. I all ready have Windows installed on an identical SSD on a M.2 NVMe slot. Both drives currently are formatted and work perfectly under windows.

I plan on using Debian to run multiple Linux VM's with KVM/QEMU from the PCIe drive since the read/write speeds are so much faster than SATA or M.2. Graphical VM's do not run well on this machine under Windows.

Respectfully

[ais77]

Important thing is if you have old-fashioned or EFI bios/system.
In latter case you already have EFI partition (about 100MB) on your first (windoze) drive so just go ahead to install Debian on second drive and let grub-installer do it's job at the end of installation pointing to the first drive - it will create grub menu and put all necessary things on EFI partition (first drive can stay first bootable in bios this way).
For non-EFI system you'd probably want to change bios to boot second drive first and install grub there (it will pick your windoze up automatically for menu. don't worry).

[Dude Guyman]

I run Legacy BIOS and MBR drives because EFI/GPT always causes me grief. Windows installed on let's call it Drive A, Debian to Dive B.
That said, I just install Debian to Drive B and GRUB on the MBR of Drive B so Windows and Debian are completely independent as far as booting. I can set my BIOS to boot A if I just want to go direct to Windows, or to Drive B if I want to have the GRUB screen where I can choose either one.

When I tried this using UEFI and GPT, no matter what I "told" it to do, GRUB would always get stuck on Drive A with Windows stuff and Debian's Drive B was then dependent on Drive A, so if I restored a Macrium backup image of Drive A, made before the Debian install, it rendered Drive B unbootable. You could avoid this by completely removing Drive A before installing to Drive B, but who wants to go in and rip your PC apart just to install something properly. If I had to use UEFI/GPT though, that is what I'd do.

I friggin' HATE UEFI/GPT!

[steve_v]

I can find noting about how and which boot loader would handle this setup.

Multi-boot from multiple drives is, for most intents and purposes, exactly the same as multiple partitions on the same drive. Grub can handle booting a different drive just fine, or you can of course use whatever "select boot device" function your BIOS has.
I'd probably make the Debian drive the primary boot device, install grub there, and have it chainload windows (with os-prober). But that's just me.

[Dude Guyman]

Multi-boot from multiple drives is, for most intents and purposes, exactly the same as multiple partitions on the same drive.

Except, you can make multiple drives boot independent of each other so if one fails or is not present (say you reinstall or restore a backup image), the other still works.

[sunrat]

Maybe this will help - https://wiki.debian.org/UEFI#Force_grub ... media_path

I'm no GRUB guru but recall this being suggested in past questions, so no guarantees! Investigate yourself to ensure this is applicable.