Anonymous
IT WORKS !!!
They say that if you give a stupid but immortal monkey an indestructible typewriter with an unending supply of paper and allow him to type for eternity he will eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare entirely by chance.
This monkey has been trying all sorts of things and I have discovered the way to make the system work as I had wanted. The problem was in the BIOS EUFI Security settings. The toad in the road was the BIOS Boot setting “Secure Boot: Enabled”. That line was grayed out and I could do nothing to change it.
Here is what I had to do:
- In BIOS I disabled both hard drives. I did that for both hard drive 0 and hard drive 1 even though I only have one hard drive installed.
- I plugged my portable SATA drive into a USB. I plugged my portable DVD drive into a second USB port (my laptop does not have an internal DVD).
- Next I booted from the DVD. My portable hard disk was the only disk visible to the system and I did a full install of antiX on that drive. I opted to put GRUB on EFI
- Trying to boot after install failed and an error message declared “Security Boot Fail”
- I rebooted again but pressed F2 to go into the BIOS. Under top menu BOOT I could see the setting “Secure Boot: Enabled” but I could not access it. It was grayed out.
- Still in BIOS, I re-enabled both of the internal hard drives (only one hard drive is installed). Then I rebooted and pressed F2 to immediately return to BIOS.
- Now under Boot Options I could see both the internal Windows disk and the external, portable antiX disk. The Windows disk was listed first so I changed it to second and made the antiX disk the first boot disk.
- Under “Select an UEFI file as trusted” I drilled down and entered one for the Windows disk (Hd0–;EFI–;Boot–;bootx64.efi) and typed Yes to confirm. I did the same for the antiX disk by drilling down to the GRUB EFI file.
- Under BIOS top menu SECURITY my Supervisor and User passwords were marked “CLEAR”. I entered a password for each of those. Apparently, unless you use passwords the BIOS will not allow you to change the “Secure Boot” option!
- Now, under top menu BOOT I could access the setting “Secure Boot:” and I changed it to “Disabled”
That was it. Now my system is doing exactly what I wanted it to do. If I do not have the portable SATA connected to a USB port then it boots directly to Windows. If I do have the portable SATA connected to a USB port it boots directly to antiX.
Some may ask why I would want such a setup. Well, first off I’m not quite ready to completely cut the Windows umbilical. This gives me both complete OSes. My SATA is a 1TB disk. There are some robust, dependable 1TB USB transfer drives to be had, Kingston for example, but they cost more than what I paid for the laptop when I bought it new, My 1TB SATA-III disk came out of a salvaged system, i.e. it was free. For all intents and purposes the portable antix disk is running just as fast as if it were installed internally because the limiting factor is not the USB3 connection. It’s the SATA-III max rate of 6 GB/s. This setup also gives me the option, should I finally free myself from Windows, of just replacing my laptop hard drive with the hard drive in the portable box. No additional install or modification would be needed.
I am still going to install an M.2 PCI 3.0 X4 SSD in the laptop as a second internal hard disk. I’ll install antiX on that and see how it works out. Perhaps I will get to triple boot system.
The help and suggestions are appreciated. Please bear with me, I’m still exploring the possibilities with a lot of learning along the way.