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I have just installed Pop!_OS on my Windows 10 pc. I have a 256 GB SSD and 1TB HDD. Windows is installed on the 256GB SSD. I installed the Pop!_OS on the HDD by making 50GB unallocated space and then using it for the boot (I had not to do this in Ubuntu?) one for swap and one for the root.

Now when I go to boot options on startup, I see two options for Pop!_OS. One says something like OS Boot Manager Pop!_OS and another says EFI Hard Disk Pop!_OS. Why are there these two options instead of one? And why do I need to create a new EFI boot partition for this which was not needed in Ubuntu?

What would happen if during installation of Pop!_OS, I select the EFI partition of Windows for Pop!_OS?

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    UEFI has a backup or fallback boot at /EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi. That is same path & file that all external drives use. A few systems use that as main boot and UEFI will often show that just as a drive or Hard Disk. Ubuntu used grub to boot, POP!OS uses systemd boot which was gummiboot: Gummiboot is dead, of course, because it was spun into systemd 2015 systemd.io/BOOT_LOADER_SPECIFICATION You can use systemd boot with Ubuntu. blobfolio.com/2018/06/…
    – oldfred
    Apr 1, 2020 at 14:30

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Your motherboard BIOS supports both UEFI and Legacy Boot options.

One reason you need to create a second EFI boot partition is that Windows is not the best at sharing boot partitions. Updates can and do overwrite this partition from time to time.

You also are utilizing two separate disks. To be able to boot off of the second disk without having to use the first disk for booting you would need to create a bootable partition on the second disk.

Lastly, Ubuntu's installer was taking care of these steps for you while Pop!_OS's was not. If you were to install Arch or Gentoo or Debian via debootstrap you would need to do everything yourself. But it is odd that Pop!_OS (being based on Ubuntu) uses a different installer.

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  • Thanks for the answer, further, can I make a partition on the ssd and select that as the popos root partition, create another one for swap and then selecting the EFI partition of the ssd( windows disk ) ?
    – Shubham Sharma
    Apr 1, 2020 at 13:44
  • @ShubhamSharma could you clarify exactly what your partition scheme is?
    – kemotep
    Apr 1, 2020 at 15:37
  • My SSD has three partitions, one is the C drive, the system partition for windows, another one is an EFI system partition of around 264MB and one is the Microsoft recovery parition of 500 MB. The HDD is a single partition and I have just stored files there.
    – Shubham Sharma
    Apr 2, 2020 at 0:44
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    @shubhamsharma for simplicity's sake I would have Windows on one disk and Linux on another with no crossover. I understand that you may have need for storage so it might be a lot easier to run Linux in a VM on Windows. Dual boots of multiple Windows installs or even just Linux installs add a lot of complexity that if you are new to Linux, I would suggest that you use Virtual machines and live boots to test out Linux.
    – kemotep
    Apr 2, 2020 at 10:41
  • I have a ubuntu 20.04 installed with it's own efi partition, when I want to install pop os alongside it's asking for another efi partition, so now I will have two efi partitions. Is it that the both the partitions will be taken in consideration while booting and if i want to del pop os in future can I del root and pop efi partition safely, (without any boot issue)
    – Sayan Dey
    Jan 27, 2021 at 10:05

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