Installing Neon on second drive

[Beerislife]

Right, I'm still slightly hungover so this might not come out right!

I recently purchased a Beelink Mini S12 Pro PC. It has a 500Gb NVMe drive that was installed with Windows 11 Pro.

It's obviously now running Neon, and apart from no WiFi, it's fine.

The little box has an internal slot for a SATA 2.5" SSD, so I'm thinking about installing one that I have and:

1: Disable the NVMe drive temporarily in the BIOS and try and install Windows 11 Pro on the SATA drive.

Or

2: Clone my Neon install to the SATA drive, temporarily hide it in the BIOS and let Windows install on the NVMe drive.

Or

3: Let Windows wipe the NVMe drive and install itself and then hide it in the BIOS and Install Neon fresh on the SATA drive and restore files and settings from backup.

What can possibly go wrong? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

[jlittle]

IMO both OS's will be snappier on the NVMe, so if it was me I'd aim to put both on it. I left behind the seductive OS per drive idea long ago.

[Beerislife]

Actually, there is a method in my madness! I didn't want to involve GRUB in the loading of Windows, I've read too many horror stories of Windows doing naughty things to it!

As the computer starts I can press F7 and choose which disk to boot, as I do with live USB sticks...

The performance of Windows is not that important, hence my preference for the first option.

I got the idea here, in the last segment of the video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGcWLgAk5kA

[jlittle]

, I've read too many horror stories of Windows doing naughty things to it!

UEFI isn't the low level black art that BIOS/MBR mode was, except maybe the secure boot dreck. There's non-volatile RAM boot variables, and there's just files, that you can copy about, and even edit.

[claydoh]

As the computer starts I can press F7 and choose which disk to boot, as I do with live USB sticks...

This will still be possible with both operating systems on a single drive. It isn't the drive that the BIOS, err...firmware, rather, is listing, but the boot loaders found. Each OS has a separate set of bootloader files kept in an EFI partition.
The EFI partition can be on one drive, for multiple OS installs on multiple drives, or you can have an EFI partition on each drive. Doesn't matter.

The boot function key is allowing you to select one of the available bootloaders, as opposed to a drive, since there is nothing like an MBR
You will still get grub when selecting a Linux boot option, unless you hide the menu or move to a different boot manager (Refind, systemd-boot, etc), and then hide its menus