have you tried reinstalling the bootloader?
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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What's that?
It is a little program that starts an operating system. It's very small and basic. It has to be put in a special place on the drive.
Is that why I still have windows and Debian option to boot? So how do reinstall the bootloader?
It could also be entries stored in efi. Won't hurt to delete them from the list in bios if starting over.
I tried but they appear back
You've messed up partitioning and EFI partitions. There are leftovers from Debian and Windows. Wipe both drives, star fresh. Make one EFI partition on the NVME drive, 512MB, and use the rest for the main OS. Use the entire SATA drive for the other boot option (no need for EFI partition on that one). When installing the second OS, skip the bootloader install. Boot into the main OS, set grub to search for other OSes installed on the laptop and update grub afterwards. The second OS should appear in grub's menu.
I would start fresh but I got data on my sata. Also sometimes it boots in grub. I think it's from Debian. Can I use that or do I need to be in a system?
I got data on my sata
Maybe it’s just with my Aussie accent but this is a great rhyme 😅
Lol, yeah, missed that 😂.
OK, then here's what you do. Wipe the NVME, install your main OS on it. Boot to it, it should read the SATA drive. Mount it, copy whatever you need from it to the NVME drive. Then wipe the SATA drive (dd or any other program of your choice). Install your second OS on the SATA drive, but skip installing the bootloader. Reboot, boot to your man OS, set grub to search for other installed OSes on the laptop, update grub. The second OS should appear in grub's menu.
If the data on the SATA drive is bigger than what the NVME can take, use BTRFS with compression (zstd=10 should do it, after the copy, you can drop the compression to 5 for better performance) on the main OS. It will compress binaries or plain text/document files quite nicely. Media, not so much, but it will cut down a few % off it.
Also, when you update the kernel on the second OS, grub won't detect that. You have to manually switch to the new kernel, but from the main OS. Also, removing old kernels on the second OS will become more complicated, since there is no bootloader installed for it.
I'll try this when I get home. Thanks
Try to mount the partition from the live system and copy the data to a safe place. Then reinstall.