I have read a few threads about multibooting like here and there, that seem to indicate that multibooting Fedora Editions may be problematic. I’m looking for advice that makes me aware of the gotchas or just says, don’t do it.
I have an old Dell Optiplex 5040 that has 3 SSD drive bays but only 8GB of RAM (hence why I don’t want to just run VM’s and I have the spare SSD’s to throw at this), and I would like to set this up not as my Fedora testing rig. I would like to install the following on the drives:
Fedora Server 41 (for testing)
Fedora Atomic Flavor (haven’t decided yet, probably Sway) to try and learn the way of the Atomic Spins which I just haven’t been able to wrap my head around yet.
Either another Fedora Spin or Atomic for fun or use it as a data drive for Fedora Server testing purposes.
Since I have 3 separate SSD’s in the machine, do I need to do anything special to ensure that they all show up in the boot menu if I’m installing each Edition or Spin from a USB onto separate drives where each drive is dedicated to the Edition or Spin?
Are there other gotchas?
Will every update with a kernel simply trash the boot menu?
It would be easiest if each OS are installed on separate disk units and you select the system to be booted from the UEFI boot menu and don’t try to make grub multiboot work. That is assuming that your system has a decent UEFI boot menu.
Thanks for the advice @vekruse. I ended up giving it a try, and I have three different versions of Linux installed on three different SSD’s.
The installations onto the different SSD’s went fine. Then I went into the BIOS to create the UEFI Boot Options and tried changing the boot order. I had the SSD’s plugged into SATA0, SATA2, and SATA3 on the motherboard (skipped SATA1 because it looked like that was normally used for an optical drive if installed, with a different color socket than the other three).
No matter what I tried I could not get the 5040 to boot anything through UEFI except the Linux distro plugged into SATA0 which was the first distro I installed. However, after changing a few other settings and choosing to go to “Legecy boot” instead of “UEFI boot” I could at least see a new section that listed all three drives under the new “Legecy boot” section in the “UEFI boot” screen that you can get to during post by tapping on F12.
When choosing the drives in the “Legecy boot” menu that are in SATA2 and SATA3, I am able to boot the Linux distros on those drives. I am also able to get into the BIOS and chose the drive that I want to be the default, and that works as well.
So I’m was not able to get the nice clean “UEFI boot” menu to work correctly on this old system, but I am able to boot any of the 3 drives from the “F12” boot screen, and I can change the default distro that boots at anytime through the “F2” BIOS settings screen now, so I consider this a win.
Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.
It is critical that you install all OSes in the same mode for ease of booting and management. When the different OSes are installed in a different mode then it is difficult to boot them even from the bios boot menu (and cannot be done from a single grub menu).
Fedora prefers uefi so that is the recommended mode. If you set the bios to boot uefi only (disable legacy/csm mode) then perform the installations everything will always be installed in the same boot mode and all should work the same.
It appears that you may have installed the OS on sata0 in uefi mode and the OSes on sata2 & sata3 in legacy mode.
Thanks @computersavvy for your thoughts. I’m sure that I installed the first Linux Distro (Lubuntu) and then Fedora Server 40 and Fedora Sway 40 in UEFI mode. Because that was the only mode selected in the BIOS settings. After installing Fedora Server and Fedora Sway, I went back into the BIOS settings and added entries for server and sway by giving it a name, and then picking the SSD that each was installed on.
Even when I was doing the installs the the USB flash drives I used with the iso’s on them were picked up by the UEFI boot screen, and I could choose those, but the installed Fedora Server and Fedora Sway, I was never able to pick those entries. They didn’t even appear in the UEFI boot screen until I added them in the BIOS settings.
So if my BIOS settings were UEFI only, I’m unsure why after installing them on the SSD’s they didn’t show up automatically in the BIOS and why I had to add them manually in the UEFI boot settings of the BIOS after install. I can’t think of anything that I did which would have caused the two Fedora versions to be installed in Legacy mode because I didn’t have Legacy mode enabled in the BIOS when I installed them.
Now the Optiplex 5040 is an old system, and perhaps its UEFI settings are finicky especially when Windows is not present on the system at all, since the BIOS lists (it is unchecked) Windows Boot Loader.
The older system means an older bios. I know that some of the early uefi bios were only able to boot from an internal drive and that booting from usb was sometimes finicky. Is your bios updated to the latest version available for that machine?
Close to the latest. Looks like it is on 1.19 and they have a 1.22 which is the last BIOS update that came out in 2022. It doesn’t say that the update addresses any UEFI issues. Updating will be difficult since it doesn’t have Windows on any drive and I’m not excited about installing Windows just to get the bios updated.
Don’t need to.
There are several ways to do the bios update without installing windows.
within fedora the firmware update manager might be able to manage it. fwupdmgr -h shows many commands and options and may be able to get the update and install it for you.
The bios itself may have an option to do the update from a file on a usb stick without using windows.
There is a bootable windows environment called winpe that can be put onto a usb and provides a windows environment without installing that can be used to update the bios. Several sites provide similar tools, but the one I use is Hiren’s BootCD PE, available at Download | Hiren's BootCD PE
Scroll to the bottom and click on the file name to download it.