I have an MSI GE75 Raider Laptop from a few years ago. It has 2 NVME Slots, and a space for an SATA Notebook Drive. It came with a 1TB SATA SSD, and a 512GB NVME. I added a 1TB NVME and moved the OS to that drive. At the time, it was Windows 10.
2 weeks ago, I come to find it won’t boot. Popped in a Gparted USB Stick, and found the SATA drive died. Pulled it and it booted up fine. Decided it was time to expand Linux to my Laptop, and bought a 4TB SATA SSD and promptly put CachyOS on it. Well, I say it was Promptly, but it took almost a week for it to finally install. (Somehow the Secure Boot options are hidden until you perform a Vulcan Death Grip on the keyboard while standing on your head humming the star spangled banner or something… And of course there’s no documentation for this and I had to find it on my own. Suffice to say, it took forever to get the options unhidden and Linux properly installed!) And while I was at it, I also had the Windows NVME pulled so I wouldn’t break anything on it while installing Linux.
Finally got a working Linux Laptop and got all my essentials setup. Then I put the Windows drive back in… And this is where the issues begin. First - Windows won’t boot. I get the spinning dots for a few seconds, and then the screens go black and it just sits there.
I tried booting to the SATA and letting ReFind try to get to Windows, but all it seems to do is find the windows recovery partition. Fine… boot to Cachy and… wait what? Now it doesn’t see the SATA Drive anymore?
I check the Bios - Storage sees the SATA Drive, but the Boot options refuse to see the SATA drive as a bootable device. Heck it doesn’t show up at all in the boot options. I’ve reset the bios to default and gone through everything again and again but nothing. Am I going to have to wipe that secondary NVME and install Linux to it? Doing that, I’ll probably want to wipe/remove the SATA drive so it can’t interfere with anything until both OS’s are back in working order. Then reinstall it as a neutral drive for storage.
Oh… Just to be clear, I had JUST downloaded and used the latest 25.02.02 CachyOS yesterday for my install. (Currently using the USB Boot version to type this up.) And I wouldn’t bother with windows if i didn’t have a handful of specific applications for it that I’d prefer not running a VM for. I’ll be testing stuff on my desktop later though.)
Hardware is as mentioned above an MSI Ge75 Raider Laptop.
CPU - 10th Gen i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
RAM - 16GB
RTX-2070
1TB NVME (Windows 10 Drive)
512GB NVME (Storage)
4TB SATA SSD (CachyOS)
Looking like I’ll want to wipe the 1TB NVME and install Cachy to that.
Wipe the 4TB SATA and re-designate it for storage (Probably go half and half Ext4/NTFS)
and lastly reinstall Windows to the 512 GB NVME
Is there anything I need to look out for or a certain order I should do things? Anything to keep in mind while getting both systems to play well with each other? Any and all advice is greatly appreciated!