How to dual boot Windows 10 from different disk?

Help
1

I want to dual boot Nixos and Windows 10. My Windows is already installed in a sdd disk, and I just installed Nixos on a different disk. Not really understanding the difference, I went with the manual and use efi to boot. I suppose osprober doesn’t work, because it is a BIOS specific thing? How should I make Grub find my Windows installation?

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2

The easiest would be to make your bios boot from your nixos disk and add grub entry that chainloads the windows bootloader on the other disk: Dual Booting NixOS and Windows - NixOS Wiki

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3

I’ve tried to do this for a while.

What I did was that I had two disks.

sda1 – ESP EFI partition (also used as boot partition with systemd-boot)
sda2 – LUKS with LVM and NixOS
sdb1 – Windows partition

Windows picked up the ESP from the other disk and put it’s bootloader there and systemd picked up the Windows bootloader and automatically added an entry with it.

4

my configuration looks like this. I just let OSProber find it for me.
The manual way lets you rebuild NixOS more quickly, but if you run into issues (as I did) you can just fall back to this lazy solution :slight_smile:

boot.loader = {
    systemd-boot.enable = true;
    efi.canTouchEfiVariables = true;
    grub = {
      enable = true;
      devices = [ "nodev" ];
      efiSupport = true;
      useOSProber = true;
    };
  };
5

Hi @Growpotkin.

I tried your configuration. It successfully identified my old Linux Mint installation that was also on the same disk as Windows 10 :smile:. Unfortunately OSProber failed to identify the Windows installation on the very same disk. I’ll try tinkering with the boot.loader.grub.extraEntries option. I’ll post results.