Envy4 boot selection menu?

[pejotigrek]

hello!

being on lockdown at home, I started to clean up all the devices and tried to give them a second life 😉 my wife's Envy4 got into my hands, and while it is few years old now, I opened the laptop and was surprised, that there's an mSATA slot which was totally empty. I have a spare mSATA 16GB SSD disk, so I've installed it and started to play. after hours of trying this and that, I was forced to do some googling & stumbled upon the forum, thit post in particular, written by user @Pepe999

he mentioned about some BIOS modding, and I got curious...

ok ok, but what's my problem? here it goes:

I've got latest Windows 10 on main HDD. it boots without problems, works fine etc. I like it to stay this way, because from time to time mobile machine with Win10 is needed in my house, so it's a perfect device to fill that gap.

upon the finding of m2 SATA slot, after disconnecting the HDD (just to be safe that I won't format it), I've installed CloudReady's HOME version of ChromeOS. it also works perfect & I find that solution great for everyday use. boots in seconds, gives all you need on daily basis. then, I've connected back the HDD and... m2 dissapeared. meaning: it's not visible on boot. I can't choose which disk to start from, searched the BIOS but there's only one option regarding hard disk, and it probably prioritizes the HDD over m2.

can I somehow add the boot select menu WITHOUT modifying both systems? is there any BIOS patch (or mod, that @Pepe999 mentioned) to add an option to choose m2 as first boot device? I'm totally ok with having to manually change the boot order in BIOS when needed, it's just SO EASIER that opening the case and physically disconnecting HDD 😉

thanks in advance!

[Lil_Boy_Blue · Accepted solution]

Hi

While I don't specifically know...

EasyBCD allows the addition of extra/other Operating Systems.

Chrome may have a BootLoader like GrUB that can add W10.

OR maybe ESC and F9 to select the device.

Maybe more than 1 boot manager already installed?

However...

https://www.neverware.com/blogcontent/2018/1/2/dualboot-a-long-goodbye

[pejotigrek]

yeah, I knew about the dual-boot non existing anymore, but after some testing - the ESC+F9 trick did the job!

as you'll see below - there is an option that boots from m2 SATA [it's called "EFI HDD Device"], while the "OS boot Manager" just runs from regular HDD.

it's a shame that this m2 didn't showed up in the BIOS settings, so I cannot set it to be primary boot device, but nonetheless - as for now I thing that it will be sufficient. not ideal, but working 🙂 if there would be any chance to add this to windows10 boot sequence, so it would ask at startup - that would be perfect, but I guess it can't be done without some serious system tweaking/reinstalling and I'm not going to fight with that now 😉

thanks for the hint!

[Lil_Boy_Blue]

Prego.