My laptop has Windows 8.1 installed on a 1TB HDD. It also has a 120GB SSD, and I installed Ubuntu on it with 2 partitions / and /home. My laptop has a 16GB physical memory, so I don't need swap partition at the moment. I have Windows on the HDD and Ubuntu on the SSD.
Is it possible for me to choose which OS I want to start on startup, because every time I start my laptop, it boots straight to Windows? I can switch to Ubuntu, but it is only when the laptop has fully started and I have to go into the UEFI settings and manually select Ubuntu, but then everything just falls back to normal like it is booting without Ubuntu installed at all.
Can someone please tell me if I could dual boot Ubuntu and Windows if they are installed on 2 separate hard drives? If that is not possible, please tell me how I can achieve this.
I managed to get it resolved by fixing the bootloader.
Best Answer
I am not an expert on this, but I have been messing with the boot order for a while, so telling from my some-what experience: So like the same way you get into UEFI settings, go to the BIOS settings (you can go to Advance Start-up, choose troubleshoot, advance options, then choose UEFI Firmware Settings - restart to get into it) [like you normally do]. After you get into the UEFI settings, you should see an option called BIOS settings or start up settings (some thing like that). Inside that, you should see an options that says Boot Priorities, Start-Up order (or something that means close to that). If you go into that subsection, you will be able to see which OS or devices have priorities over other installed OS(like Ubuntu)/devices(USB, DVD). In you case, probably Windows OS or UEFI is above Ubuntu OS. So change the order of it via the given control options to bring Ubuntu option above Windows.
These things differ for each manufacture, but the base operation is the same. If you give some more information about your computer's (that had Ubuntu installed) manufacture and/or model, I will try to be specific. [the mentioned above is for Dell Laptop]
Probably this video helps :)
Hope this information helps at least a little :)