On 25/10/2024 at 00:21, Nick Gawronski wrote:
Hi, I did more checking and found that this system does not support master boot record booting as the two drives are two terabytes and from what I have read that size does not support the master boot record option.
DOS/MBR partition table format supports up to 2 TiB (2.2TB) on drives with 512-byte logical sectors (and 16TiB on native "Advanced Format" drives with 4096-byte logical sectors). So it supports 2TB drives.
Also, the partition table format (DOS/MBR or GPT) must not be confused with the boot mode (legacy/BIOS or EFI). It is Windows which only supports legacy/BIOS boot on DOS/MBR or EFI boot on GPT. GRUB and Linux do not have such limitation.
The windows drive does not have an efi partition but the first drive with debian does.
Can you post the partition tables of both drives shown by fdisk -l or parted -l ?
Was the first drive present and did it already have a EFI partition when Windows was installed on the second drive ?
I am now trying to find an accessible way to create a windows bootable usb stick which so far I have not been able to do yet as etcher acts like it is not for this purpose and woeusb is not packaged in debian as pipx install wants the gtk development libraries which were not installed with build-essential.
All I know is that Windows ISO images are not "hybrid" and cannot just be written "as is" on a USB stick. Microsoft provides a tool to create a bootable USB stick from a Windows ISO image but it runs only on Windows.
I had someone look and no windows boot manager exists in the f7 boot menu but it just takes me back to the top of the list of boot drives
Is the Windows drive present in the list of boot drives ? If yes, what happens when you select it ?