Question Windows 11 and Linux on separate drives?

[Verax]

Hi!

I’m thinking of installing Windows 11 and Linux Mint, each on its own physical SSD. The idea is to have only one of the SSDs physically connected at a time. Will this work, or will Windows 11 run into problems because of TPM, EFI files, etc., when I reconnect the SSD with Windows 11 on it?

I’ve been using Windows since the days of the 80486, but I’m quite new to all this stuff with TPM, UEFI and EFI files.

BR
Verax

 

[HelloNNNewman]

An easy explanation was posted over on Reddit a while back:

Booting on an SSD is easy. If you really want to make sure the two don't interfere with each other, buy an external SSD and install linux on it. Plug it in and boot to it, it's a linux machine. Pull it out and reboot, now it's Windows again.

Hope that helps!

 

[Verax]

An easy explanation was posted over on Reddit a while back:



Hope that helps!

Thanks!

I tried both an HDD in an Orico docking station connected via USB and an HDD in an external cabinet also connected via USB. Perhaps I did something wrong during the installation of Linux mint, but neither attempt worked. In the first case, the LM boot files wound up on the W11 system drive together with the W11 boot files, ande the rest of LM got installed on the external HDD. In the second case the installation of LM aborted with an error after a while.

That's why I want to try with separate internal SSDs now, that I swap back and forth between.