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I have two SSDs in my PC, one with an existing Windows 10 installation and another I just added that I plan to install Ubuntu on.

The ask: How to install Ubuntu without GRUB. I want to keep Windows 10 as the default and when I want to boot into Ubuntu, I do it via my BIOS boot menu by selecting the Ubuntu SSD.

I read here that manually setting the GRUB timeout to 0 doesn't work because it resets if more than one OS is detected.

Also, if I decide to remove the Ubuntu SSD in the future I dont want to have to repair Windows to get the Windows Boot Loader back. So I'm trying to avoid installing GRUB entirely.

Any suggestions? Besides just using a VM? :p

Much appreciated.

Fahad Al-Riyami
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2 Answers2

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As suggested, removing the Windows drive then installing Ubuntu on the secondary drive is the way to go.

After installing Ubuntu, put the Windows drive back in and change the boot order in the BIOS to whichever drive/OS you want to boot first. Then you can boot into the secondary drive/OS using the BIOS boot menu.

Fahad Al-Riyami
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This is not the intended use case for grub annoyingly. The only option is to disable any drive for which you do not want the Master Boot Record (MBR) to be affected during the ubuntu installation.

Alternatively back up the MBR on each other drive you have attached before installation, and then after installation use the backups on any drive other than the one with Ubuntu installed. You can do this with with a variety of partitioning tools and a quick google brought these up depending on the current operating system you have on those drives:

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/bootice_64_bit.html

https://opensource.com/article/18/7/how-use-dd-linux

Be cautious when using linux tools to backup/recover windows drives/disks as this may have unintended consequences! The phyiscal drive removal seems a lot easier unless there are other caveats, for example some laptop's warranty is removed when opened. You may be able to disable some of your drives from the bios setup menus.

Ubuntu's grub is a life saver for having dual boot on the same drive, and you can't really do dual-boot without it as far as I know. However it has a major flaw when using dual-boot across multiple drives as you pointed out, and I hope you have found some answers here.

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bmbigbang
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