I’m on a laptop with a Ubuntu 24 and a Windows 10 dual boot on one disk, and I’ve added another disk with a single NixOS partition.
I’m a Nix beginner and I don’t know much about bootloaders, sorry if the question is obvious, but when booting before the second disk, there was a grub boot screen where I could choose the OS I wanted to boot from. However, as systemd is used to boot by default for the Nix disk and it is set to the highest priority in the bios, I don’t have access to the grub selection screen. Changing the priority wouldn’t change anything, as NixOS isn’t listed in the grub selection of the first disk.
I can still access the list of bootable partitions and launch them from the BIOS, but it was to my understanding that if I switched from systemd to grub for nix, I could maybe list all partitions on the two disks, and launch any of them without having to go to the BIOS, which is a bit of a hassle.
Is it possible to have a grub selection screen that encompasses both ? I’ve already tried and failed to install grub instead of systemd using other topics in the discourse and the wiki, but I don’t understand most of it.
I would advice you to stay on systemd and just use the bios menu. Grub is a buggy mess that many nixpkgs maintainers would like to see removed eventually.
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You can accomplish this with systemd-boot too, using extraEntries and windows.
I personally agree that using the system boot menu is generally better, though. That’s UEFI working as intended. Just find the shortcut that lets you pick a bootloader rather than the shortcut that opens BIOS and use that.
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