Can dual boot be done this way?

I thought I would be smart with my laptop but it’s not quite working out. It has an m.2 drive with windows 11 installed on it as Drive C and a second m.2 as Drive D. I also was dual booting between windows and PopOS on a usb ssd drive. This worked okay but opted for Fedora in the end. I know this is backwards from what most Dual Boot howto’s on the web show but thought I would give it a try.

I removed the m.2 “C” drive and installed a new m.2 on which I installed Fedora 41 KDE. Works about like expected and I have used Fedora exclusive for a few weeks now. If it didn’t I could just switch out the m.2’s and be back to my existing windows install.

My thought in this process was to add the old m.2 C drive to a Thunderbolt enclosure and somehow setup and use dual boot into Windows for those times where I need actual windows for a few things. So I added the m.2 “C” to a Thunderbolt enclosure and I can’t seem to get it to boot. Something sees it but I can’t get to it. I’m not sure if the dual boot setup from PopOS is interfering with booting the windows m.2 in Fedora or this is just not possible.

Any thoughts on how to fix or setup a reverse (where Fedora is first) dual boot between Fedora and the windows Thunderbolt? I can see and access the windows Thunderbolt drive from Fedora so I should be able to edit what is necessary I think.

Your idea sounds reasonable to me. It sounds like the problem is to do with Windows. I don’t think Fedora is in any way interfering. If you can boot from the windows installation disk (or maybe the recovery partition) then you might be able to run Window’s boot repair and that might fix whatever paths are wrong in the Windows boot loader. The repair can be done manual as well using the bcdboot command, but it’s been ages since I messed with it. You’ll have to search for some online tutorials for help with that.

Thank you for the replay and suggestions.
I did some more research on these forums and consensus was while it might work, if also may not work for various reasons like windows insists on being first, UEFI/Dual UEFI, Secure Boot etc. and most suggestions were unless you relly like punishment, to just redo things and to go the more traditional way of windows first then install Fedora and let Fedora setup the dual boot.

My current thoughts are to use a windows 11 VM in Fedora and install certain software products there that won’t run under Wine which I tested and the software works in the VM. It’s not the first choice but will work.

I think the better choice long run would be to put the windows m.2 stick back in the machine, remove the current m.2 “D” drive and replace it with the new 2 TB m.2 that could be divided into two partitions, reinstall Fedora on one partition and let it make the dual boot stuff, and then copy the contents of the old D drive onto the second partition. This would give me my current windows install, my desire to run Fedora most of the time, and my current “D” data drive all on one machine. I would also get a 1 TB thunderbolt data drive that would be very useful for working with raw files from the camera.

1 Like